


Hold Me Up To The Flame

by Zigzagwanderer



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Falling In Love, Fluff, Hannibal is a binman/trash collector., Kissing, Make-up, Making Love, Poetry, Porn, Smut, William is a writer/poet., break-up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-07
Updated: 2019-02-23
Packaged: 2019-05-03 15:32:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 21,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14572047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zigzagwanderer/pseuds/Zigzagwanderer
Summary: Will is a writer in need of many things, including inspiration.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Weconqueratdawn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Weconqueratdawn/gifts).



> I have been reminded recently how absolutely wonderful you guys are! So just wanted to say how much i appreciate you all! Thanks so much for being out there! Xxxxxxxxx

_Poem viii._

_Coins of spark, contract in me._  
_My passage paid, mirrored, most desired of deaths;_  
_Charon, show me bone. Give me seed to seethe between my teeth._  
_Do not return me, here, to my unwanted Alexandria._  
_Where all flow hollow with a lack of noise._

 

It is six in the morning. William Graham doesn’t open his eyes. Someone else’s sweat has solidified on him and it is heavy and hard, like a cast around a broken body. His eyelids are weighted, as if he had been crying in his sleep.

As if. As if.

There are noises from the city outside. A metallic and glass storm rumbles closer, up the silent street, growling and screaming. 

“Fuck that truck.” Alana pushes her head further beneath William’s bedding; she is that most cryptic of creatures, a literary agent with an ear for phrasing. “Are they even allowed to collect garbage this early?”

“Window’s open. Noise gets in.” William shrugs, sliding out towards the kitchen, uncomfortable enough at last. 

The back door into the garden is ajar so that Merion can come and go as she pleases. She is out there now, dark against the lighter splay of the honeysuckle. William can smell the sharp scent as she pisses against the tangle of deadwood at the base of the trellis. It cuts the sweetness of the air, like lime through rum.

“Weather report said it was going to be hot last night,” William mutters. 

“Gee, thanks, I wasn’t the only one not trying, asshole,” Alana says, wandering in, pulling a face as she tugs on a tank top.

But she is not particularly offended. That’s the whole point.

They find some cigarettes and start smoking while the coffee cooks on the stove.

“So, Margot?” William wonders when Alana will leave. How long the inevitable dissection will take. A fresh cadaver. 

He watches his dog snuffling out amongst the overgrowth. Nearly blind, now, but as interested in dirt and dead birds as when she was a pup. “She the One, then?” 

Patterns, patterns. 

William washes the sex out of his mouth with smoke.  
Alana gets a different cup and saucer each time.  
Is there anything here which is not transient? Erasable?

Alana begins. William starts gathering together last-minute trash. 

She always does this when she starts dating someone new. Gets scared that it won’t be worth the investment. Rings William up in a panic and then brings over beer and her prevaricating heart. Stays the night. 

It is just fucking. For both of them. Occasional. A test, William assumes, in some way, for Alana. For William, it certainly saves a shitload of trouble and that cologne that costs too much to squander.

“Never mind Margot,” Alana says, perversely, finishing up. Her cigarette. Her coffee. Her autopsy of love. She screws her knotted hair aside. Means business, now. “Where’s the rest of it, Will? You promised. A collection of verse, Will. A full collection.”

Merion comes in slowly, feathered paws wet from the long, succulent grass. 

“It’s done when it’s done.”

“Don’t make me re-issue.” Alana smiles unkindly and scissors her crossed legs out of the animal’s way. “A fifth anniversary? That’s desperation. A last resort. It enhances nobody’s reputation.” 

Is it five years? Since _‘The Chapel Cycle’_ was published? Five years in which to forget Matthew utterly. And, seemingly, how to forget how to write a half-decent poem. Whether about loving Matthew or not.

It isn’t as if he hasn’t written since then. It’s just…a novel is not the same as verse. Short stories are not the same as verse.

It isn’t as if he hasn’t written brilliant, award-winning prose since then, William shouts, loudly, angrily, at himself. 

It’s just…not the same thing at all.

The garbage truck is nearly upon his immediate neighbourhood. Bestial, crunching. He can hear the banter of the men that harvest and gather in the garbage for it. The servants of the great devourer. 

William frowns, amused, at the lousy imagery. 

“You have drafts of the first seven poems, Alana. By the time you negotiate for better cover art than the last time, I’ll be almost done. Just because a cycle of verse is about fucking, you don't have to use fucking to sell it. You made promises too.”

William goes out of the front door and down the front path. He isn’t much for gardening and so the overhanging branches crowd into him and drip on him and he gets wet, paper-thin blossom petals in the crooked snarls of his hair and on his shoulders.  


It’s colder than it looks from inside. Still early. 

Should have put on a shirt. His skin prickles.

He reaches the gate at the same time as the guy collecting his crap.  
It’s the kind of exchange William can deal with. A nod, a grunt.  
No need for words. 

No need to be a _poet_. 

He’s just a man, offering up things he doesn’t want any more. To a man who doesn’t want them either.

The guy is whistling.  
Not ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’. Not ‘Danny Boy’.

The guy is whistling something that repeats and lingers, simple but with enough space in it to be complex. William stands and listens and thinks that it might be something modern. Choral. Maybe Scott Perkins. 

Either way, William forgets to nod or grunt.

The guy stops and stares at William over the top of the rusty gate. Over the top of William’s garbage can. 

His face is sin. Demonic because it is so very, very neat in its sensuality.

This is not a servant of a devourer, not by any means. If there is devouring to be done then this is the face that will smile as it does so, itself.

The guy is wearing black gloves. He’s got on a neat, black button-down with sleeves folded to the elbow. He makes the municipal badge look like an emblem, a crest. 

His hair is tidy, a little silvered. His throat is strong, tanned.

He picks up the fully-laden container and his arms go up and his muscles move to make it all happen.

William watches it all happen.

Leather tightening on knuckles, tendons flexing, the smell of soap and clean sweat as the guy hefts the load onto one shoulder. 

The garbage-man is watching William watch. 

He switches from whistling to humming, keeping up the contact between William’s eyes and his own. He slows the refrain, stretching it out, lowering it down as if he has moved from quick, hard strokes of sound to something deeper, more achingly deep; the kind of music that pushes in and makes your spine hurt. 

William is lured forward, to hear better, his body lies vaguely to itself, until his skin touches an icy metal hinge and he blinks and steps back. Instead of dumping off the extra trash he can’t let go of it.

The truck catches up with the men who go before. 

There is a call. The guy turns. Walks away. Whistling again.

William looks at the guy’s shoulders.  
He feels dizzy. There are webs across his mouth. But not across his eyes.

He looks at the guy's ass. He can see that in the right-hand back pocket is a book.

An all-too familiar book. 

And the corners are ragged, as if they have been bent, and bent again.

William stands in his front garden and clutches an armful of empty bottles against his chest like some used glass shield. 

And he wonders which parts of ‘The Chapel Cycle’ the guy from the garbage truck likes best.


	2. Chapter 2

_Poem xii_

__

__

_Impaled, I come to you._  
_I am under a banner;_  
_A truce of open-mouthed blades._

 

Another two weeks. Of taking out trivial pieces of trash. At the last moment. Personally. To his garbage guy. Each Friday. About six in the morning. 

William takes Debussy back to bed with him, afterwards, then he takes Bartok. He receives back-pocket glimpses of Berrigan, then Milton, which, given that the garbage guy is a fucking fallen angel to look at, makes William grin sly and slow for the rest of the day. 

It isn’t quite a dance. There are approaches and withdrawals. Comings and goings.  
And in between, is the fulcrum, the teetering point on which unspoken consideration becomes desire. 

Then there is one weekend where William is forced to travel to do a book signing. Last year’s novel.

It seems unnatural; these people. He has never written a single word for _them_ , and yet, there they are, believing he has done just that. 

He wakes. There is no Siren’s music to devil him in the dim dawn. 

He sits on his hotel bed in New York, watching the clock, trapped between the beat of the seconds and between resentment and anticipation, the two things ultimately one thing, one metronomic thing, and he watches until the hands are as wide apart as they will go. 

Then he closes his eyes and he shuts his fist and it is all wet again; wet, white magnolia again, all black buttons and dark eyes again, the ripe, green smell of everything again, and he comes so hard he cramps up as if he has been stabbed. 

Alana meets him at the breakfast buffet downstairs and tells him he looks different, somehow.

“Uhh, and be engaging with fans, but not, you know, encouraging,” she counsels, talking where he doesn’t, using the steel coffee pot as a mirror. “Last thing you need is another Matthew situation.”

William has been gathering up the ripped-apart little sugar envelopes. A stray spirula of citrus rind curls around his finger. He crumples a paper napkin up into blossom, then catches himself hoarding the refuse in the palm of one hand.

He stops.

“He was…” he pauses and corrects himself. “Matt is, a competent poet.”

Alana licks carmine off an incisor. “You know damn well there’s no such animal. You’ve either got the claws and the…lack of mercy for it, or you haven’t.” 

She leaves to go meet the publisher. As Verger’s is owned by Margot’s brother, Alana is going to apologise in person for the fugue state of William’s muse. 

He spends the hour before the flight home looking in book stores. His hands are greasy against the stiff, shiny columns. It feels like he’s picking out an engagement ring. 

Choosing blank verse that will cut that work-reddened, tanned skin. That will cut those forearms, that flushed, damp collar of neck that shows between shadow and shirt. Cut it like a diamond, and make it bleed. 

Because of him. 

In the middle of the hipster stacks, William shakes his head. At himself.

It is a fucking joke. 

And in the end, he heads for home with nothing but some fancy New York dog chow for his girl.

But he’s walking towards the gate again, come Friday, just the same.

He actually pulls on a nearly-clean t-shirt first. 

It is a fucking skin-itching, mouth-drying _joke_.

The verdure crushing the width of the path is denser than before; he tells himself that there is no metaphor there, that water and heat will just do that. Nonetheless, the drab, soot-silted jungle steams on him, he is so needful of this encounter that he fries the dew right off the leaves.

William should cut it down, the brambles and the boughs, just to fight the cliché; the poet in his unapproachable tower, the wolf in his den. But Matthew was all for truth and openness, and look how that went.

He hears the garbage guy humming on the sidewalk, and cuts his face on a thorn in his haste to push through. 

If not for his glasses, William might well have lost one eye.

He has some waste paper clutched in one hand, a Dylan Thomas Miscellany in the other. His own copy. He must have had it for twenty years. When Matt was at his destructive worst, William hid it amongst Merion’s spare blankets, to save it from the pyre. 

The guy in all black is stood, still, by the gate. The city identification badge is chained around his neck. His sleeves are folded up, as usual. He hasn’t so much as laid a gloved hand on the garbage. He is just standing there, with his arms relaxed, down by his sides. The Eric Satie composition he offers, quietly, in the stillness, is stately and intriguing. The smile, although small, is offered too, and is the same. 

William is separated from him by the curlicued wrought iron alone.

He discards the bundle of old newspapers down, gently, on the top of the left-hand gate post. There is no truth to them being there at all.  
He breaks away from looking at the guy to consider the book he has in his hand.  
Wordlessly, he holds it out. 

The warm, mint-scented music stops. The rotation of the earth stops. Only William’s kindling, rising essence does not stop; poetry is risk, writing it is a sacrifice of pride and therefore an assertion of power. 

Even if the gift is thrown, with a sneer, into the trash truck, by the guy that William wants more than he has wanted anything in a long time, he will have fitted himself back into what he was, before love made hate of his own worth, and pared him away from it. Before he was self-betrayed, subsumed and eaten by one who was weaker than himself, and yet cleverer, because he knew how to use love. 

To impale.

But the neat, sweating, serene guy in the city's black does not sneer. He takes off his gloves and he holds out his hand and he takes the book from William, and turns it over, then back again. His smile widens a little and he nods, pleased.

On the other gate post, opposite to where William has laid the fraudulent rubbish, the garbage guy balances some small, cogged piece of machinery.

“The truck has just broken down,” he explains, gesturing at the metal part, which still glistens with lubricant, is still wet from its extraction. “Mysteriously. Until the relief vehicle comes to pick us up, we are on extended break.” He shrugs, William shivers. “Maybe half an hour. A little over. The new truck has to be dispatched from the depot, you see.”

William notices the absence of the beast now, above the roar of his own courage, his own yowling yearning, in the silent street.  
A little rain has begun to fall, no more than a powdering of silver on the guy’s dark shoulders and the leaves above William’s head.  
William can smell it more than he can feel it.

He blinks, then unlatches the old metal clasp. The rust is damp and memorial. He opens up the front gate, wide. 

“Then I guess you’d better come on in,” he says.


	3. Chapter 3

_Poem vi_  


_The gown of you,_  
_the sheen along your arm._  
_Draped on bone. The sheen_  
_of it, the fibre, the vein._

 

The garbage guy leads the way through William’s own front door and into the vast, glacial hallway. 

William follows. 

There are wet shadows on the guy’s button-down. His spine down-points, beneath the wet. Muscles move darkly. His profile changes, light and dark, as he turns his head. First one way, then up, around, then in the other direction. 

As a frame, and not the focus of William’s attention, the place he has lived in for over a decade becomes blurred, becomes strange. It is cold. He does not know where he is, at this moment. 

He does not know himself.

The other doorways and the curving staircases stare at the two of them, incurious. It is an old house. An experienced house. It does not hold its breath. 

“Would you mind if I washed my hands?”

William waits for the guy outside the closed bathroom door; he is not certain where else he should go. 

He is stranded on ice, there, in his own hallway.  
He feels remote; the tiles are cold, they are a dirty white beneath his bare feet, ceramic floes that, as he stares harder and harder at them, shift and spin, so that he is no longer convinced that they will hold him up above his own grey depths. 

Then the guy comes out of the bathroom and looks very serious and very intent. There is no echo to him, he is not shadow, he is clear and well-defined; he is just himself, dark against the white walls and the white wood and the tiles. 

He corners and crowds William, gently, between the bookcase and the moon-faced mirror, and William goes backwards, easily, strangely, as if he knows of no other way to move.

And yet all is new. 

Very sweetly, the guy from the trash truck holds out both hands and shows William his palms. It is an unironic act. William looks at his hands and then at his mouth and his eyes. William takes the guy’s wrists, lightly, in the unclosed circlet of his thumbs and forefingers. 

He looks at the guy, at his eyes and his jaw and his straight, defined mouth which is a little open, and he is clear and beautiful in the light-spill from the glass door. 

William pulls him in by the wrists, then lets go, so that the fracture point, the place where things might break, becomes where their mouths might touch; this point alone becomes important.

Their mouths draw together and William touches his lips, which he has wetted with his tongue, against the guy’s soft, lower lip.  
The wall is cool behind him, radiating a white, glowing chill in the spilled light.  
They open their mouths, softly, a little wider.  
Breaths come. Wet. Soft. In and out.

And William breaks for him, over him, deep and cool; all is shadow, cool and strange, and he realises that he has been holding his breath, he has been waiting to shatter, to plunge, for an age. 

For long moments they kiss. First kisses. Slow. And soft.  
Wet and gentle and soft. 

William is afraid. That the guy will stop. That he will carry on. That the guy will snap his neck and fuck his broken body.

“Are you," William pants, a little, "are you some kind of…of…?”

The garbage guy nods, brushing up and down with his lips and tongue.  
“Hmm. I am. I am a crazed sociopath. That you have invited into your home.” All of his words are breathed into William’s mouth. They make him shiver.

“Fine.” William unclenches his hands, his fingers hot and numb and sparking, and he touches. 

O, he touches.

He rubs his fingertips on the guy a little, just on his waist, above the hip, and he finds a sliver of skin where the button-down is a little loose, a little fold of damp cloth which he worries and widens until he can untuck the material completely. 

“Christ.” William brings his teeth into the kiss. He wants to be so rough. “Christ.” 

He slides over the guy, smooth, hot-cold glides of palm and fingertip. 

They watch each other. Their eyes are black moons. 

The garbage guy lifts William’s clothing up and over his head, his shoulders. 

He is weighted with desire, and so his head goes down, and he falls below the surface of propriety, of escape, and he takes William with him, under, and he sinks himself into the hot-cool shadows of William’s throat, then his ribs, then his sweet, pale hipbone. The guy is just shadow now, just breath and fingertips and tongue. 

He looks up, because now he is kneeling, and he looks up and William breathes more quickly now, and pushes the guy’s head back down.

The guy opens more buttons, the cotton thin and worn. He slides William out, and into the wetness of his mouth.

“Christ.” William brings his hands to the guy’s hair. He wants to pull so hard. “Christ.”

The tiles shift, William is sliding, the ice is burning underneath his feet.  
He is pulled down, down to drown, then he begins to rise into light.  
Then down again; the guy sucks William deeper, even deeper, into his throat, and it is burning wet, hot-wet and sliding, like the moon in water, constricted by ripples, and after a little while, it is like drowning, like the grip of sweet, pale death itself.

The guy from the garbage truck is swallowed by William’s need, and swallows back. It is a reflection of moons in water, never-ending, an infinite circle of need and hunger. Rippling on. Hunger and need. 

There is only shadow, then there is only light.  
And then there is nothing.

And then there is William, opening his eyes.

He breathes, hard now, and looks down.  
There are moons on black ripples; the black button-down drips a little.

William touches the guy’s face. His reddened lips. They both smile at the touch.

“Shall I kill you now?” The guy says, and rises, and kisses William on his mouth, his arm around William’s waist, his hand in William’s hair. “Here, and again, over and over?”

“Christ, yes,” William tells him, “yes. Yes.” 

The guy’s mouth is sweet, and sour, now, and deep, and drowning.

Then a key circles within the old lock on the front door.  
They both turn, but do not separate.  
Even as the door opens inward, making such a noise in such a beautiful, heavy silence that they have made, they remain close together.

And they stand there, together, as the heat from the front garden comes into the cool, shadowy room.

As Matthew pushes the front door open and walks right in, across the ice.


	4. Chapter 4

_Poem xv_  


_Know? I do not._  
_What is lost? The body of meaning._  
_Saved and dawning,_  
_you walk past the window,_  
_stepping my words into fire_. 

 

“What the fuck?” William puts his dignity back inside his striped pyjama trousers.

He is still wet from the guy’s mouth. 

His neck is still held by the guy’s hand.  
It should irk, it should itch like a knotted fucking rope, but it does not. 

He would have it tangle there, tighter, in truth. 

“Get out of my house, Matt.” 

Matthew stares back, blankly, at a flushed, febrile William that he does not seem to know.  
It could be that he can only recognise William when he is isolated. When he is unspent. When he is potential, when he is prey.

Matthew turns his machine gun gaze towards the guy. The spoiled front of his shirt. The swollen front of his jeans. 

Merion whines from the kitchen, and it is pretty much how William feels, too. 

“Jesus, Will. You shouldn’t shut her in like that,” Matt reproves, and takes a step forward, towards the back of the house; it is so artfully natural, so reasonable and so right that he should do so, that he should correct William’s mistakes like this, that William cannot stop him. 

William cannot stop the last few years from reversing; they flicker, grey and white, across the hallway, a movie reel spooled backwards, agony reduced to some arthouse shit that he would have once adored.

But, there is the weight of another hand upon him, now.

There are possibilities. 

The possibility of absorbing, negotiated mornings, of both tea and coffee set to be forgotten on respective nightstands, of adjacent pages turning, asynchronously. 

The possibility of bothering to fuck someone the way they like to be fucked, of being drunk on Jacobus Gallus, and night breezes, and joy, while someone that likes him fucks back. 

The possibility, perhaps, of poetry.

“No, Matt,” William decides, maybe, perhaps, “not this time.”

And the garbage guy doesn’t really move, as such, even then. 

Except to take off his shirt.

The circuitry of the room changes.

Matt is so used to being the current; the control, the on, and the off. How shocking, to be bypassed, and by such a small gesture.

But _that_ , when you’re made like _that_ , all ballet and beast, is enough.

There is a silver ring through each nipple.  
And cursive, in the colour of post-midnight regrets, scribes over the garbage guy’s skin. Shoulder and bicep and breastbone. 

Silver and ink. Ink and silver. 

William’s teeth ache from wanting to tug at the metal, to bite at what are unequivocally his own words, but which are now words that belong, equally unequivocally, to the guy’s body, as if that was the only reason that William wrote them to begin with; to be worn. By him.

“I do not know if you deserve chouquettes from patisserie Benoit today,” the guy says, “you have covered me in you, and I must change. My co-workers tease me enough about us as it is.” 

And William looks up, slowly, because he is being picked to play.  
He frowns, because he has never enjoyed games; he is a poet, and lies are not his language.

The guy simply stares back. There is complicity in the bourbon-and-honey, but no coercion.

So; William dusts off a kind-of smile, and he uses it to cover up his qualms. “Uh, yeah. Sorry..? You go ahead. I’ll do laundry later…” 

And then, his old brick bluestocking of a house just opens right up, it becomes blousy and wind-blown and inviting, and the guy just breezes right on up and into the wide open doorway of William’s bedroom. 

“Jesus, Will? He’s living here?” Matthew puts his hands in his pockets and points with his chin. He has a bruise on the edge of his brow. “Your fuck-buddy Bloom know about this situation?” 

He is thinner, and that, if anything, has concentrated his poison; two pools of it tremble above one tense, sullen slash. 

“Give me the key, Matt.”  
“I want to see Merry.”  
“No.”  
“I miss you. I shouldn’t have ever…”  
“No.”  
“Someone said you had something new coming out. Can I at least read it?”  
“No.”  
“I can help you, baby. I understand your gift like no-one else. I can make it sing again for you, baby…”  
“No.” 

It is not all mere repudiation. William would be honest about their past, if he had to be. It is just that he needs these negatives; it is the only way for the apple to survive the worm. 

“Go back to Frederick, Matt.”  
“I had a really bad fight with him, Will. All night. I mean we hit each other and I slept in the car, and he said I’d just about used him up…”

The garbage guy is back, costumed in a too-tight sweater. All this mummery might not be to William’s taste, but it’s an easy enough fiction on the eye.

He fills his hands with William’s book and his own black gloves and then with William’s waist.  
“Try to get Merion to take her medicine without bribing her with pancetta,” the guy who collects the trash encourages him, gently. “And we must decide tonight on those new those dishes from Taisels.” 

Then he kisses William, in front of a guest. It is discourteous; a lover’s liberty, and William has his own salt spread back onto his tongue.

It is a pretty definitive kiss. It certainly dissuades William from calling the stalker police right there and then. 

“Oh,” the guy turns then, to face Matt, “and if you do not pass that key back to William instantly, and leave our premises, I will push your eyes into your skull with my thumbs, and kill you.”

What he actually says is that he will telephone the authorities and have Matthew removed, but the guy’s entire demeanour tells it differently.  
Matt throws the key on the floor as he goes. The tiles are a hundred years old; they can take a little petulance.

And William walks the garbage guy out through the front gate.  
The city beyond the wall is yellow and grey. It has coughed itself awake, and is already sweating out fresh poisons. 

From the gutter, half a block away, the replacement trash truck adds its own catarrh to the expectorating stink and simmer of it all, and the guys that are hanging off the sides of it are hollering for their guy; for one foolish moment William doesn’t want to hand him back. 

“Uh,” William doesn’t want to wait for the next trash collection either. He straightens his glasses. “You, uh, like art?”  
He has forgotten, it seems, how to fancy up his phrasing.  
He is too busy watching the guy’s eyes crinkle up tolerantly as he waves down his crew.  
“I like you,” the guy replies mildly.  
“Uh. Oh. There’s this thing. A show." William shrugs. "Paintings.” 

The neighbour who hates dogs and queers and intellectuals spits when she sees them, standing ridiculously close on the exhaust-sheened stubble of sidewalk. 

“It's Sunday night, anyhow. At the Stag Inn.”  
“I know of it,” the guy nods. “A lovely old coaching-house. I would be pleased to attend.”

William hears the cat-calls from the truck. They’re obscene but they're ok. Oddly supportive. And there’s a name mixed up in the nonsense, but William has also forgotten how to understand words of more than one syllable.

Instead, he bites the guy’s lip. Hard enough to get some kind of a taste of the guy, even if it isn’t the taste he wanted. Hard enough for the guy to be sore for the rest of the day, which is what he does want. 

“What name?” William lets go before he can’t. “I mean, I don’t know what name to leave at the box office. You know me, right? But I don’t know you.”

“Hannibal,” the guy tells him, walking backwards, all ballet and beast, silver and ink.  
“You can call me Hannibal.”


	5. Chapter 5

_Poem iv._

_Wings. Arch-bone._  
_I watched_  
_you put it down on the floor._  
_Wrist-watch-bone._  
_You told me it would die_. 

 

It is a city office. The traffic oceans along outside, reflecting silver up against the windows. The couches are ridiculous; lagoons, bright and wide. 

William is thinking; tonight. 

He is thinking that he wants to eat his own words.

A display of shells has washed up onto the table. Their pink, furled entrances curl outward, glossy against the dermis of driftwood.

William looks away from them, adrift.  
His saliva turns to sand. 

The psychiatrist drops down, unexpectedly, onto a floor cushion by William’s boots. She browses through the precise paperwork from the Verger publishing house. 

“Don’t worry, this kind of consult is contractually standard now,” the young woman flicks her ponytail and shrugs, “when there’s a problem with a writer, you know, getting it up, creatively speaking.”

William stares. “Excuse me?”

Dr Katz is barefoot.  
He supposes that this is Alana’s idea of an informal process.

“You were in the State Mental Hospital after your work started getting all that attention, all those shiny awards,” she scratches under one arm with her pen. “Anything in that we could deal with?” 

“I don’t equate acclaim with insanity.” 

“It was a week’s voluntary committal,” the files tell her, and she tells William. 

As if he didn’t know. 

“Couple sedatives," she adds. "Then check out. Cool.”

Memory needs no prescription. No permission.

Beast. Angel. Madman. 

He doesn’t even like other people’s poetry. But that Welsh drunk had it nailed right there.

What the fuck is William Graham? 

Cursed.  
A word synesthete.  
A linguistic cross-associative. 

He has evaded diagnosis all of his life. 

For there are tricks to taming it. To making sure he can live in a world where he is not constantly mauled by metaphor.  
Until he let the monster loose, for love, for Matt’s love, the whip and chair were working well.

Dr Katz frowns as she flatters. “You were a little young to be burnt out.”

He was not young, but he was ashes, and no-one forgives the phoenix that does not want to rise, for fear of the returning flames.

“So,” she sighs, as the silence rolls like surf across the room. “Any ideas at all, Will? How can we get those jammy juices flowing again?”

William blinks back. 

“You have deadlines, my friend. So…I can refer you for group? Would a workshop help?” 

“No.”

Dr Katz unfolds herself and practically cartwheels over to the stoneware pitcher, the artisanal beakers. 

“I don’t normally give out dope to writers,” she admits. “But, you seem unusually negative. Don’t you want to be a poet again, Will?”

He glances deliberately over at the form that needs to be signed off to satisfy his agent and her master.

He clears his throat. “Are we done?”

She looks into him, and he feels himself pull back from the shallows, pull back until the light itself shelves away. Then she just smiles and brings him over a drink, although he didn’t ask for it. 

He holds it balanced, on top of his knee. Cool seeping through.  
His head aches. He smells ginger. Lemon, cloudy in the cup. 

“I would like to help, as well as get paid.” She perches next to him. She is so insubstantial that the padding does not even bend for her. “And Mason doesn’t take kindly to the talent letting him down, Will.” 

Starfish crawl up the walls. He is drowning in the blue. William shuts his eyes for a moment. 

He is silently begging her not to ask him about what Matthew did to him.  
How he was pushed towards the pretty pucker of pandemonium. Praise and promises. The sacrifice of sanity to syllables. 

She moves back, delicately, to let William breathe. 

“You ok, Will?”

He is ok, but he has muzzled his true mouth, and set a cage upon his deepest tongue, and he does not know how to speak his sacraments again, or even if he should.

A little while seems to pass then. And when he opens his eyes, the cup is nearly empty, a greyish rock-pool at low tide.

“Look, just nod or whatever, yeah?” Her voice is gentle. He can see that she isn’t writing anything down.  
“Got any money worries?”  
A shake.  
“Lucky guy. Support network? Family? Friends?”  
He supposes Merion and Alana count. “One that works for me.”  
“Ok. Good. Seeing anybody currently?”

William looks at the ceiling. 

“Huh, don’t know. I mean…” he hunches up. “No. Well, I have been seeing someone. But…”  
His fingertips are beaded with wet. “I don’t know. I know him, even though I know nothing about him.”  
He runs them down the outside seam of his cargo pants. “Tonight.”  
He decides. “I am seeing him. I am seeing him, tonight.” He wants to smile, but not at a psychiatrist. “I mean, if he shows up. He might not. But he said he would.” 

“Ok.” Dr Katz does a little bird thing with her head. “Ok.”  
She cracks her knuckles. She has a very bland expression on her face. “Then maybe we should start there.”

 

The dog-sitting service doesn’t show, so William has to ring Alana. Alana has to discuss the change of plans with Margot, who then has to pick Alana up and drive them over to William’s house. 

He sweats his way across the park in a tweed jacket and then starts to run down Albany and when he does get to the Stag Inn there is no-one at all waiting for him outside or in the lobby. 

He goes in anyway, to the gallery, his chest splitting and throat bleeding great gouts of air. His glasses are slipping down his nose.

He doesn’t look at the colours or the textures around him.  
Because he sees Hannibal _immediately._

Hannibal’s hair is falling forward, and there is something smudged, dark and smoky, around his eyes.  
His bones are better to look at than the art.  
He has a glass in one hand. 

William thinks of vintage Helmut Newton prints. 

Although Hannibal is wearing a black suit and a black shirt and a black tie, tight and buttoned, buttoned up to the neck, buttoned down to the wrist, for William he might as well be bare, with a silver collar around his neck, and the ends of a silver rope trailing down his back. 

He wants Hannibal to turn his head over one shoulder towards him.  
Away from the painting he is looking at.  
Not his body. Not all the way, at least.  
Just his head, so that Hannibal is looking back at William over the line of one shoulder, with all of the black glitter of his eyes showing above the long, powerful line of his body.

William wants to be offered the ends of the silver rope. 

And Hannibal does. 

He moves, but only a little.

There is availability, then.  
Invitation in a hip.

And the way he chooses to stand, when he sees William looking right at him, makes William want to put him in silk. He wants to put Hannibal in silk from toe to thigh, that long line of him, strapped and sheer, gartered to the groin, just so he could peel it all off him, again, later. 

He walks over to Hannibal without recovering his breath because there seems little point to that.

He leans in towards Hannibal and he kisses him on the mouth. Vodka and vermouth and smoke and sins to come.

“Hi,” William says. “Can we go somewhere? I can’t wait. Put down that fucking drink. I want you. Right now. Can we go?” 

A woman nearby glares. 

William Graham wants to write something out on somebody’s skin.

And Hannibal Lecter smiles.


	6. Chapter 6

_Poem ii_

_The sweat of saints is cold_  
_and bitter; their marrow is saltwater._  
_Yet still_  
_you would have me suckle bone._

 

“Take me back to your place.” William says.  
And Hannibal murmurs; “nothing would please me more.”

The words flow, venously, downstream.  
Jugular to ilium; such untraversed lands, sheeted in ice for an age.

But then, there is the pause.  
There has always been _the pause_.

“But you know that we cannot.”

The old floorboards of the Stag Inn see-saw; William has stepped back.  
Seven leagues. Seven years.  
Back to the earning of adorations. Permissions to fuck.  
Back to Please-me and You-can-not. 

William steadies himself. An angular couple, geometric in panelled shifts of sailboat canvas, slide between the satin-black and the tweed, looking at the pictures, and William lets them.

He lets the perfectly matching pair sail and shift between the smoke-and-silver, and the something that was once clay.  
But is malleable no more. 

Perhaps he is disoriented because there are too many chopped-up walls in the gallery. Enforced angles, lopsided frames.  
The ceilings are either too low, or they are about to fall in. 

William thinks; this is how gods destroy their churches.  
Not with thunderbolts, but with disappointments. 

And Hannibal is watching him. And he is not pleased now, he is puzzled. 

William wants to tongue-tip Hannibal from his lips, he wants Hannibal hard and herbal, down his throat, spiked like rosemary is, for remembrance, but he smears across his mouth with the back of his hand, instead. 

It shakes. Hannibal frowns now, and is still, unfortunately, beautiful. 

But before William can just fucking leave, just go back home and wonder if it’s him, if it’s been him, if it’s always been him, all this fucking time, if he asks for this victimhood in some way, Hannibal reaches forward. Takes William’s cold hand very lightly between his fingertips. 

“I only _request_ that we linger, William, as it is Lawrence’s first show.” He is speaking carefully. “And your face...”  
Here Hannibal stops. Looks away, then back, as if trying to stare into a light that is too bright to bear. “Your lovely, lovely face, it is not as unknown as you might think. And if William Graham leaves immediately, might not others follow, misunderstanding your haste to be gone?” 

Lawrence Wells, the name on the programme. The older guy in the corner, taking confession.  
William can see Lawrence Wells as he stands, painfully extracting truths from the hushed worshippers of his crucified works. He is absorbing their opinions as sins. His eyes are not eyes made to speak with; they are eyes made to listen. 

“Uh.” William pushes his shoulder blades together, unimpeded.  
He wonders when it was that he lost his own wings.  
“Right. You just want us to…be nice. To behave…nicely.”

Hannibal scrapes William’s palm with his thumbnail.  
“We can be…not nice in a little while,” he promises, and his voice misbehaves with a rough delicacy that threatens to cut clean through William’s skin.

William wants to be flayed and parted, like that. 

“Uh. Sure.” William would smile back if he wasn’t such a fucking prick. “Sure. Support the arts and all. Sorry, I...I…thought…I don’t know what the fuck I thought.”

Alana, he thinks, would be rolling her eyes right now.

And so, it is simple; satin-black and tweed take a look around. 

William sips from Hannibal’s noxious martini.  
He really wants a beer, but he really doesn’t want to go get it.  
Because, of course, he and the garbage-guy are holding hands. Like they’re a couple, or something. 

They make out, a little, because this is the Patchworks, and nobody minds. 

Hannibal is interested in the paintings. William doesn’t care much either way.

They are totemic; the guests in their motley nod knowingly in front of the more macabre stacks of limbs and howling faces, which are apparently representative of society’s ills, for fuck’s sake, but William dislikes the slaughtering reds and cadaverous blues and is concentrating on trying not to bite Hannibal anyway. 

There is a certain part of Hannibal’s throat that he _wants_. 

There is the scent of Hannibal, drifting over, when he turns his head, that William is stupidly over-aware of; the feral perfume of it makes his mouth wet. 

And there is the metallic colour of some strands of Hannibal’s hair, amid the kind of well, brown, that William just wants to touch, and then pull, and then feel against the inside of his thighs.

They meander from one pile of painted meat to the other.  
As often as is possible, they nudge their bodies together.

Hannibal’s darkened eyes engulf him.  
If he doesn’t do something, William thinks, then he might have to resort to rutting in the restroom. 

That particular imagery doesn’t help _at all_. 

He drains Hannibal’s drink. “You, uh, live in the city?”  
“Yes. Here in the Patchworks. A few blocks over.” Hannibal drops his lashes a little. “Not far.”  
“Hm. Above a bookstore, right?”  
Hannibal tuts. “Not every building in this neighbourhood is a bookstore. We have tarot card readers and organic produce markets and cabaret-bars and experimental theatres too.”  
“But you do live above a bookstore, right?”

Hannibal kisses him; savaging him into silence.

Nobody minds. 

“Uh, so, fortune-telling.” William tugs at his curls. Winces, but it helps. His lips ache. Isn’t he too old for this?  
“All your bullshit guesswork, messing with Matt that way? Not that I don’t approve, but…No man is a hero to his trash-collector? That it?” 

“Correctly misquoted,” Hannibal moves his shoulders, in that way he does.  
Casual shrugging can be erotic, William is finding out. 

“We live in a sadly disposable society. With neither the skills nor the inclination to mend what becomes broken. So it is that entire histories are now discarded. Myself and my colleagues, in every city, on every trash-truck, we are made witness to this, whether we like it or not. Archaeologists of the ephemeral.”

William knows that his life is full of empty cartons. 

From the veterinary service.  
Grocery.  
Some place in Maine that sells plain, ordinary clothes and somehow remembers William’s sizing and what colours he tolerates.

Nowadays, he will buy from any place that delivers what he needs.  
Without delays. Without mistakes. Without any need for contact. 

Even if hope itself could be shipped, then Will wonders if he could be trusted to treasure it?  
Or would it be like the endless supply of tea-cups from Taisels, conveyed so tenderly towards the Calvary of William’s careless hands.

“You’re good at joining up the dots, though,” William persists. “Inference, or intuition. Whichever. You still decipher the person from the debris.”  


Hannibal allows a small, dark thing to tilt up his mouth. “I studied forensic behavioural analysis, quite some while ago. Classes and some lectures. I had a personal interest at the time, and the training was useful in a number of ways.”  


“Really?” William raises an eyebrow. “The investigative side of the fence, or the criminal..?” 

He does not finish. 

They have migrated through the body of the gaudy gallery to a tiny, dim cavity. 

A broom closet, at the back of the old building.  
An afterthought. A side-chapel.  
Just four white walls with spot-lit masterpieces at William’s precise eye-level. 

They are all alone with the bones on which the flesh of protest was later hung; Lawrence has clearly taken up, in more recent times, an angry brush.  
But these are older, less sophisticated, more straightforward sketches.

All nudes. All in pastel, on ivory paper. 

All of Hannibal.

“Holy fuck.”

William is instantly hoarse. 

He stares.  
At seven provocative poses. Reclining. Arching. Standing. Bent. 

In every one, Hannibal is stretched, and bound with white rope. 

William is instantly hard.

There is no silver, yet, on these versions of Hannibal. Anywhere. 

And while there is plenty of poetry for William to read, right goddamn there, laid out right in front of him, page after page of it, unlined, but opened and folded and creased, there is none that is yet made in ink. 

“Holy fuck.” 

“Well,” Lawrence knocks on the doorway beam. “I think I’ll interrupt here and claim that as compliment rather than censure.”

Hannibal ducks into a friendly embrace.  
“I like the exhibition, Lawrence. This is William Graham.”  
“Ah.” The artist looks from Hannibal to William.  
“I am so sorry, old friend, but we must go, directly.”  
“Ah.” The artist looks from William back to Hannibal.

“Are these for sale?” William clears his throat. “I was…just…I collect.”  
“You do?” Lawrence says politely.  
“Not so much those,” William gestures back to the horrors in the main rooms, “uh, I mean these…drawings. I collect…drawings. For, uh, investment.”  
“You do?” Lawrence scratches his white crown of hair. “Then I hate to have to tell you, but these are not for sale. They reside, we could say, in private hands.”

William flushes at that, then more so at his own irrationality.

“Do not tease him, Lawrence,” Hannibal scolds. “Or he will curse you in a haiku someday.”  
Lawrence grins, widely.

Hannibal takes William by the elbow, moving him to the door.  
“They belong to me,” he whispers, loudly. “This charlatan was in need of experience, many years ago, now, but could not afford my rates. So, I agreed to model in return for the works themselves. He borrows them back, occasionally.”

Hannibal looks briefly at himself, over William’s shoulder. “The knotwork was an interesting addition.”

William says nothing.

They walk back through the Inn. The air grows fresher with each odd corner turned.  
Finally, William looks at the guy he is with.  
“So, I’m dating a model?”

Somewhere, possibly half-lost happily in Margot, Alana is laughing.

They come to a stop in the lobby.  
“You may have any of them you would like.” Hannibal takes out his cigarettes. “And, is that what this is, William? Are we…dating?”  
“What do you think?” William takes Hannibal by the jaw. “Will you take me home with you now? Please?”

He has played nice for long enough. Been a good boy, and on his own terms. Which are Hannibal’s terms too.

He kisses Hannibal, as deeply as kisses can go.

“And you’re damn right I’ll have one of those dirty pictures,” he adds, quietly. “That one of you with your legs spread,” he tells Hannibal. “I want that one. I want you like that. I want you like that now. So take me home.”

The Patchworks is just waking up; it is opening its neon eyes now that everything is dark enough. 

The pavements are crawling with colour and movement, and require negotiation.  
Hannibal is waylaid repeatedly by acquaintances and neighbours.

And never has William Graham wished more fervently for wings.


	7. Chapter 7

_Poem v._

_The ground is hardly there._  
_The ground is hardly there._  
_Catch me, I smile._  
_And you shine with old honey._

_It is the scraping of summer._  
_It is the end of our summer._  
_And the stone sun counterweights over_  
_the wings on the water._

  


The loft is on top of Betty’s Books.  


Ironic Cheesecake. Gingham and gloss.  


A sailor-suited Vargas blonde is racking up pulp paperbacks by the outside staircase. She salutes Hannibal as he and William stumble upward, off to war or somesuch.

William has been, essentially, fucking his model boyfriend, using the medium of kisses, all the way home.  
It isn’t nearly enough. 

The bed is in the main room. William is on it before he realises that’s what it is.  
Hannibal turns back towards him. Comes into the lamplight.  
His tailored black shirt is cut with panels of black mesh.  
Specifically; shoulder, bicep, collarbone.

William, framed by Hannibal.  
Hannibal, branded for William. 

He upstrokes and curls, indigo, over Hannibal’s skin.  
His vowels roll, tongued in sheer shadow, and his glottal stems thrust hard as Hannibal stands there. 

“Your goddamn mouth. Christ. Put it on me?” 

William takes off his trousers. His tie and his shirt and his jacket are not so important; they can stay where they are. 

Hannibal lays him out and shoulders William’s legs and then there is the heat of it. Dry at first, blistering circles on flesh; smouldering circles on the tightening cloth.  


William is uncool; he is afire.  
Here, and here. And here.  
He grinds the back of his head into the pillows. 

“Jesus. Use your tongue.” 

And so, then, there is the wet.  
Hannibal slides his saliva through and around and under William’s shorts. On and on.  
Delving into folds. Smudging kohl onto the white cotton.  
Tacky black. Tacky spit.

They wriggle apart so that Hannibal can pull the waistband down.  
Off.  
Then Hannibal kneels over William, and considers him seriously, tilting his head to one side.  
He smooths the rucked edges of William’s jacket over his belly, flat. Neatens the riding hem of the shirt beneath.  
William feels like he should maybe straighten his tie.  
Hannibal has made him as proper as you like, from the waist up.  
Below, William is wanton; sweat-spread legs and peep-show cock. 

The loft is head down in the lap of the Indonesian restaurant out back; the balcony doors are open, wide. They let in the molasses, the charcoal, the musky anise.  
Hannibal is all of these sweet, hot, spiced things; he nudges aside the prim curtain of material, and sucks William in, between his lips. 

“Fuck. Yes.” William wants what he hasn’t had, for, it seems, forever. “Finger me. Fuck me with your fingers.” 

He floods, as Hannibal rubs himself up into his own mouth, tight against William, who is already there, already filling Hannibal, then rubs himself all the way down the stream, down the wet-washed valley of William’s body, and then buries himself where William would have him.

Just a little.  
Just to the joint. 

William bucks. Gets teeth for his trouble.  
Hannibal looks up, and it is the friendliest of warnings. 

William sees Hannibal’s eyes. How the heartwood has burnt away, leaving embers alone. Black within the red and ringed by black without.  
It is so very simple, the arrangement, so pretty, so infernal. So like disobedience, so like Dante. So like the skull of a broken bird.  
It is the bone-scent of the red-black knuckle that is pushed to the side of the plate.  
It is the first death fished from the river, the bloody gasping darkness of where the hook is, the applause that comes, confusingly, for what is surely a transgression.  
William is staring at Hannibal’s eyes, and, too easily, he is thinking of something else. Then something else. Then _everything_ else.  
He can hear the sound that hell makes, when you drop a copper penny in; when you make the wish that you cannot take back. 

William’s body is starting to lose his mind.

Hannibal stops, immediately. Gets up, but not in abandonment. In appeasement. To break the souring spell.

“You need to breathe.” Hannibal puts his hand so that it is alongside William’s hand. Not holding the wrist, not a shackle, but just there. Nearby. “Breathe easy, William. Do not see. Breathe.”  
The hollow orbits, the grails, the wounds that do not heal, begin, gradually, to close, to empty, to cure. 

After a while, William is there, he is quiet, he is listening to the clatter from the courtyard. The cursing in Malay.  
Some sort of guitar music from somewhere.  
The chug of city transport.

Hannibal has already poured him a scotch. William wants to rest on the coverlet, curl against the cushions that smell of laundry and toasted sesame and Hannibal’s cologne, but he knows that he doesn’t belong there.

“Look. Thanks. It’s fine. It’s…nothing.” William drinks up and shrugs. His tweed is like a blanket you have used on a panicking horse. Unattractively prickling with abated fear. “An old, dissociative problem. I’m fine. I’ll go.”  
He corrects the sit of his glasses and pulls at his hair. Remembers where his trousers are. “I’ll leave.”

“If you wish.” Hannibal is bringing the bottle back over to him. Offering elderflower water too, instead.  
As well.  
William can have anything that Hannibal has.  
William shakes his head.  
“I prefer that you stay,” Hannibal arches his jawline as he deals with his collar studs.  
“The bathroom is here,” he nods towards the left, sliding out his cufflinks. Showing strong wrists. “And there is fruit and tea and wine in those green cupboards. If you require sleep, there is a guest bed in the attic space.”

He smiles, a little. Ruefully. “There are, of course, books _everywhere_.” 

Calmly, he drops the window-shirt onto the floor. 

William’s cock heats. Unbelievably. His pulse is in goddamn _chaos_.  


“Ok,” William checks his own understanding of the situation. “And while I’m making myself at home..?”  
Hannibal takes off his belt. Unbuttons his trousers.  
“Your body has aroused me, and I want to touch myself.”

The suit is, suddenly, all gone. 

“You can watch, William. You can play with me. You can wait elsewhere if you would rather, and we can go out to eat once I have made myself come. You are in control, and can do exactly what pleases you.”

All that Hannibal wears now is his silver, and his ink, and his underwear.  
It is the duskiest, dirtiest rose-pink that William has ever seen.  
Clinging, sin-pink. Smoke-pink. The colour of innocence, adulterated with experience.  
The raw of it curves around Hannibal’s hips. His cock. 

There is some ribbon, threading the silk.  


Black. Or dark grey.

William cannot think, because he is too busy thinking.  
Of wildflowers, of velvet petals. Of how they would taste if they were plucked, pressed, warm, leaking salty perfume, against the roof of his mouth.  
He has allowed himself to think of these things, because they are his thoughts, not his monster’s.

They are entirely his, and Hannibal’s. 

“Eye contact.” Hannibal says. "It overwhelms you?" 

He lifts away a shawl from some fancy Japanese folding screen, some vintage piece of furniture or other. 

William stares, unashamedly, at the movement. 

The fabric flutters off, a fringed bird. Underneath, it is not a screen.

“Uh. You want us to use a…mirror?”  
“It can be less…invasive,” Hannibal murmurs, “more…removed, yet more…intimate.”  
He raises his chin and looks out from under his fringe. 

Their eyes meet. In reflection. 

And William wants to tell Hannibal how lovely he is. How hard, how soft. How right is the balance.  
But he doesn’t want to be a poet. Not there. Not then. 

“Well,” William says, reasonably. “I guess it can’t hurt to try.”


	8. Chapter 8

_Poem xv (unfinished)_

_Mask, mask, Matt, Matt._  
_Can’t do this. Anymore. Hate hate hahaha._  
_What will happen when you kill all the birds???_  
_when all the muses die?_

 

He wants to take hold of the ribbon and pull, tease out the ends of the bow between his fingers, and pull. Wrap the ribbon around his fist, and pull.

But he also wants to ask things.  
To be allowed things.  
“Can I see you?” William says quietly, and mostly with his hands. 

He has undressed. But he is pale, penumbral, because the mirror _glows_ for Hannibal.  
Gold and rose-gold. Silvered glass giving itself to gold.

Eclipsed, William is just limbed lead.  
He doesn’t care.  
He might be glad.

He kneels behind Hannibal. Licks at Hannibal’s neck.  
Eats up Hannibal’s opiating sweat.

He wonders what Hannibal will smell like, after.  
After Hannibal has come, which is what he says he wants.  
After William comes on him, which is what they both want. 

Rutted-into, hide-scented, sour and honest, like the beautiful animal he is.

Because, honestly, Hannibal is beautiful.  
His blood-drugged skin is beautiful. The contoured shape of his upper lip is beautiful. 

William knows that these are over-used words, but that only boring, ordinary words are needed; Hannibal is no briny peach. He is not something once dreamed of in marble, that has been seduced towards completion by the thrust of the chisel. 

No.

He is a man. Calloused and muscled. Real and thick-cocked. 

No allusion or allegory is necessary.

And William thinks; could it be that simple? 

“Watch me, then.” Hannibal unties himself.  
Slowly.  
In front of William. 

“Jesus. Fuck. Christ.”

William is boringly, ordinarily, slipping into love.  
He laps messily. Everywhere. To push his craving tongue deeper into Hannibal’s mouth. “Fuck. You’re so fucking…fuckable.” 

Hannibal lets the silk melt onto the floor, but trickles the black mercury of the ribbon across his chest.  
Threads it through two of his silver rings.  
Lays the leash in William’s hand.  
“Gentle,” Hannibal warns, against what his eyes say.  
And William intends to be.  
Very, very gentle.  
Just not with himself. 

“Spit.” William offers up his palm.  
They watch what he does with it.  
He gleams Hannibal with it, greasing along the other, the unnameable alloy of him, the hard length of him, the hardest red-gold of all, and yet the most velvet. 

Together they watch.

Grease and gleam and glow. The loving slip of it all, while William tugs at Hannibal’s laced nipples.  
William curses, plain and unpolished, at the goddamn _sight_. 

Until Hannibal is too close, and Hannibal rolls his head back.  
And William trembles as Hannibal comes, staring at him, dark animal eyes alight.

There is no pretence to beauty from William in that moment, as he grunts and grips hard, and fucks himself with Hannibal’s come.  
He is as ungentle a man as he can be, fucking himself over Hannibal until he falls, backwards, onto the bed.  
Panting.  
Mumbling words that are rust, or may in fact be just-mined, may just be the undiscovered ore of some new element, but at which Hannibal smiles, all sleepy, invited pleasure, and clambers up, clumsy now, into William’s unrefined embrace. 

The Patchworks are carolling in through the balcony doors.  
Songs and sermons and sirens.  
The heat of the city’s unholy hallelujahs.  
Syrup and salt from the sidewalk.

If William had to describe himself in that moment, he would not call himself beautiful.  
But he might call himself happy.

They clean up. Kiss.  
William’s cell arpeggiates.  
It is Alana’s tune; some haughty empowering diva shit.  
Hannibal excuses himself.  
William pulls on his pants and wonders which of Mason’s maniacal deadlines he’s missed now. 

And Hannibal is out on the fire escape, smoking, discussing Expressionism with the blonde from Betty’s Books, when William finds him.

He is lost.

“It’s Merion,” William says, searching around for a cab, as if they are on sale in nearby shop windows. As if they are being cooked up in the warung below.

“She’s sick, Hannibal.” William lets the garbage guy hold him by the arm. Then the waist. He is dizzy, and he is lost.  
“Alana thinks Merion’s been poisoned.”


	9. Chapter 9

_new cycle/draft of poem one/notes_

_Under tunnelled starlight, we are the unbled,_  
_Still my hands, unstilled, thigh-down, (tremble)_  
(What the hell colour is his hair anyway? fucking _mocha_?)  
_There is no blasphemy, in the (sorrow of )sickness here; blessed,_  
_your celebrant knowledge of our self-oiled skin._  
(Brown?bronzeshieldingheartshieldme/mine…shield/sword? Loved/passive/loving? Dammitdammit.  
Hannibal. Wet. goddamn. God.  
I wantwantwant the wet sword of him) inside. Me. God…………  
(..i am _so_ fucked.)

 

“Thanks.” William holds Alana.

Because that one word is all he has on this. 

Her elbows fin against his ribs; she is already twisting towards the black-green front garden.  
Slippery in her silk. 

Her scent is different, now; subtracted, smoothed out. Something catalytic has altered the chemistry of her, as surely as it has upscaled her perfume. 

William mutters his thanks again, to Margot, through the wavering weed of Alana’s hair. 

Catch, release. 

He lets her go. 

To Margot; a still silvering of the warm, dawn current, she is holding steady, halfway down the gravel path. She has been, perhaps, the steadiest of them all, this night. 

She flicks her head reflexively, back at William.  
She flicks William’s gratitude away, as if one encountered poisoned dogs every day of one’s life. 

And William sees; Margot is the kind of broken that is surprised when worse things don’t happen. But her brokenness does not limit her; she is beyond bedlam, and before the veterinarian took over, and before William and Hannibal got to the emergency room on Hannibal’s Bonneville, she dealt with Merion.

William would hold her too, for that, for a moment, if such a thing was possible, for either of them. 

So; nod, deflect.  
It’s all either of them has on this. On anything. 

But Hannibal, in the broadest sweater William has, simply goes right up to her. With one hand he gentles her forearm, guiding her to receive the crumpled carton of Rainbowties he has salvaged from the pocket of his cargo pants. 

“You enjoyed them, I think, and there was one box left,” he shushes, a sweet tide of sound, and he is all shared secrets with her, and softness, and he is gift-wrapped for William, even at this distance, in stretched-out fisherman’s cable. 

There is a brief brightness. At the neon-sugared vending machine candies they have been chewing all night in the animal clinic’s fluorescent waiting area.  
“Thank you,” Margot says. “I know they’re awful, but I’ve never had anything quite like them.”

Then, Hannibal returns to William’s side, standing in the doorway, and Alana walks Margot out to their car.  
It is a clumsy cotillion; there are mumbled goodbyes. 

They are tired, Merion will pull through, William has never known such anger. Unfurled, it is feathering, righteous, red.

And it unbalances him, and he stumbles, and he falls right through the house. 

“Anything at all that is selfless about me, that is kind, or disciplined,” he tells the cornices, the cobwebs that flutter in his wake. He tells Hannibal, who turns from filling the kettle. “That’s down to my girl.”

William paces, out in the garden, and wonders if he should let Matt know.  
Then he stops, and wonders if Matt knows, _already_. 

He rubs his hands on his face, raw to the changing light, buried by the chafing wings, the undirected hate. 

And the birds begin their suburban slang overhead, and then Hannibal is there, to bench him, and put a blanket on him; to pale the pinions back down into his skin. 

He sits, too, eventually, and takes William’s glasses off. And hauls him over, sloshing William’s doctored tea in peaty waves upon the flagstones.  
Hannibal shakes his head. William, startled, has offered him some of his medicine. As if Hannibal wanted whiskey, not William’s arms. Not William’s spine, pressed close. Not his lapping, to comfort.

“Plain water for me.” Hannibal takes the cup from William too, and puts it down. “I have work in an hour.”

He pushes them together.  
Pulled out. Tight. Mouthing.  
Tepid fevers upward to scalding.  
Their foreheads together, then, looking down.  
William is desperate. Aching. He cries. Claws. Comes. Cries again.

And later, when he wakes, William puts his foot into circles of cold tea, and finds that his trousers and belly are still slippery at the seams. 

And Hannibal has not washed up the crockery, either. 

He has not left a note, or a single dewy rose, and there is no glass of water waiting for William, no concerned bottle of fucking aspirin. 

William snorts. He flakes Hannibal idly from his fingers, and blinks, eyes crusted like an infant, in his sweaty swaddling.  
He cannot understand how all _this_ is so…ok.

He goes, blearily, into the kitchen. Dials the veterinarian.  
And it is while he is waiting for an answer from the recovery suite, that William sees. 

A length of ribbon has been tied around his left wrist. Black, or possibly dark grey. Somebody has taken care to bracelet him beautifully; they are lover’s knots, or possibly he is just fastened securely, as if he were a hook, to a line.

William is not to be easily unhitched.

Unless, perhaps, he can think of a better use for the ribbon.  
In which case, he will surely need to ask somebody for assistance. 

Which, of course, is absurdly, and absolutely, ok. 

 

The sharp old trees of Clariana turn the mid-morning gold into bitter yellow, the dust on them dampening to sulphur.  
No vulgar sparrowing seems to be allowed. 

Scrubbed, simmering, William clanks along the estuarine avenues.

Rustily.

It is not even remotely on the way to the clinic.

William navigates into the upper reaches of the district, where money sops up sound, and the very asphalt is downy.

Damasked with bluing spots of rain. 

He grits his gears. 

The temperature rises, the storm bid on by gods; when it comes, it would do well to begin here, where the richest temples are.

Chilton’s residence is one of the smaller, gated islands. But still.

“My, darling Matthew is such a popular boy today.” Frederick is summoned by the help and keeps William on the porch. His nose is taped, his left eye still kissed with purple. “Like Alberto told you on the telephone, Matthew came crawling back here directly after you threatened him. Hysterical, I might add, so he’s been sedated since…”

“I haven’t rung,” William frowns. “Sedated?”

“Oh. Well. I assumed, when that deaf old fool said the caller was a man of few words…Anyway, I don’t know what all the interest is, suddenly, regarding Matthew’s whereabouts, so if you’ll excuse me…”

“Yesterday. Merion was…unwell.”

Frederick’s gesture casts such unimportant viscera far away from the unblemished parquetry, out into the gutter, where wolves may fight over it.  
“Yes. Alana mentioned all that nonsense, when she was here earlier.” His eyes narrow. “But I’m sure I shouldn’t be discussing Verger business with, well, shall we call you…an interested party, and say our fond farewells?”

It’s never come up, Alana keeping Matthew on her books, keeping her values parallel; private, and professional. 

Frederick starts to close the door. 

William blinks. “Matt isn’t, uh, trying verse again?”

“Hardly.” Frederick grimaces. “Mason is a brutal critic, but they’re often the best kind.”  
He shivers up at the foaming thunderheads. He has long forgotten what dishwater grey looks like. “Matthew is fully aware, now, where his best chance of being published lies.” 

“What?” William fumbles out a hand. The ribbon makes his wrist iron, and Frederick has to push harder on the varnished oak. 

“Patient confidentiality," he enjoys snapping out the term, immensely. "I like to think my therapy has helped dearest Matthew come to this revelation.” 

“What?”

“That there are more lucrative uses for that deliciously wagging tongue than simply licking cock.” 

Dr Chilton’s teeth are the last thing to shine through the crack. “Namely biography, Mr Graham. And, namely, _yours_.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> apologies for delays-an unkind week.

_new cycle-poem two_

_Open. Sing me into a slave._  
_Leave rooms, and sharkskin my reason._  
_Reverse the needle._  
_I would unpick you, entirely, if you asked._

 

Alana is fortressed by meetings. For fucking _days_. She unfurls no flags from her battlements, and her texts are parchment-dry, with no promise of truce.

And sweet Merion sleeps. And sleeps; in meadowed dreams she runs, fleet again, keen again, a dart, aiming for poppy-breezed places where William cannot follow. 

And then there is Hannibal. Or rather, there he is not.  
For it seems that Hannibal does not belong to William alone.  


William never truly believed that he did. Might. Could.

So.  
There is the work.  
Always. The scourge of it.  
Not the solace; that part of it is not for him. 

William sits in the chair and suffers the words to strip him down. 

And his dressing-gown pockets become bear-traps, spiked with scalpels and scalpel-sharpened pencil stubs. And he trails things, bitten-into things, from the kitchen to the chair and back. 

The hours spin, or crawl, and he doesn’t wash; water feels unholy on his skin. He drinks scotch for the same reason, keeping his throat impure, and ready. 

Then he thinks; to say _what?_  
To suck _whom?_

Of course, because he does not want water, there is rain, abstract and underlit. 

William grinds his elbows against his desk and his mind crawls and spins and the weather slides beneath the eyelid and the eye.  
The trees serpent, greenly, against the windows, leaving scales in the trickles of venom spitting from the sky upon the glass.  
The night begins. The clouds hiss. 

William sees Matthew out amid the storm. 

Matthew. In the garden. The first man. The apple. The worm in the apple. The great worm itself. The dragon. 

William sees that day.  
Eden, ended. 

Matthew’s body. Matthew’s body. Wet, and shining with the glory of such trespasses as gods make men for, then forbid them from making.  


Matthew, reaching into where the hedges caged the wet-feathered hearts within, black and blinking back through the thorns.  
He sees Matthew holding out his hand. The small shape. And his smile, oh, his smile was _everything_. 

William turns away. 

And, after a long time, he scratches it all down upon the paper.

 

It is, maybe, midnight, when the doorbell finally rings.  
When William, who _never_ answers such summonses, skids across the hall, sock-footed.

It occurs to William, as he hastens to unchain the lock, that he is yearning.  
The want of it is both soft, and savage. Erotic, and mundane.  
The want of someone to make him eat his oatmeal. For someone to use his hips, to spike him down upon a reflection of his own desperation. 

And when he says someone, he does not mean someone at all.

He has nowhere to turn from it. It is the best memory he has not yet had. 

He kicks some boots under the hall table and stuffs the unopened mail into a pocket.  
Slices open his fingertips. 

The police officers stand in the doorway and watch the poet bleed.

“Fuck. Uh. Yes?” William holds the envelope so that it catches the drips, the disappointment.  
“Bad time?” The one apologising is in a plastic coverall. Under an umbrella. He is awkwardly taking off a pair of thin, plastic gloves.  
“Just routine,” he nudges the other one, who is in a police slicker.

One is dark-haired, the other blond.

“Uh. Is there…something wrong?”  
“If your name’s Mrs Doemling then very much so,” the uniformed one deadpans. “Unless you enjoy being poisoned to death in your own home.”  
“Mrs Dumlin?” William frowns down at his red hand. “I don’t know...?”  
“Well, I can tell _you_ weren’t the son she always wanted but never had,” the officer says pertly, waving his torch backwards. “Weird old lady, right next door? Not exactly kind to critters? Lots of little ol’ funny-shaped humps all over her backyard?”  
“And some stuff floating in jars that didn’t look much like pickles to me.” The other one nods sympathetically at William’s bewilderment. “Not a close neighbourhood, I’m guessing?”  
“Uh, no. Not really.”  
“Who know what goes on in all these suburban basements, right?” 

William finds it in himself to shrug. 

The woman next door snarled. Spat and muttered. Stuck unsavoury, hand-written pamphlets through his door. Stared at Merion and Matt with the same hate-filled hunger. 

She did not, indeed, bake him cookies.  
She may well, as it turns out, have tried to kill his dog.

“You said _poisoned_?”  
“Looks like an accident. City worker called it in. Old biddy probably thought she was putting sugar in her tea. Only it wasn’t sugar.” 

The quieter man recites some complex chemical compounds.  
William tastes the toxicity in the syllables.  
They are caustic, they choke in the mouth.  
Organic malevolence.  
It is all William can do not to show his teeth, righteously. 

“Ok,” he says in a flat voice. He hopes, he goddamn _hopes_ , that she suffered. “So..I’m not sure how I can help you…?”  
“Oh, this is just, y’know, just routine. See anything suspicious? Anyone you know wished the deceased harm?” There are eye-rolls. A theatrical yawning noise. “Routine enquiries. Tying up loose ends. Blah blah.”

William considers. Wonders if the clowning works. The bumbling, brainless bonhomie. 

The two officials are watching him carefully, beneath their bored smiles and exaggerated indifference. They are sharp instruments, sheathed shabbily. One-way mirrors in dimmed, twinned rooms. 

“Uh, no,” he shakes his head. He holds up his hand, now slippery to the wrist. “Um, look, I’d better go clean up...”

William, eventually, closes the door.  
He stands in the hallway until Merion comes out looking for him, stumbling a little, still weak. 

He wonders about cruelty. 

And he bends to pet Merion’s head, and is careful not to get blood in her fur. 

 

The Patchworks is glowing out from under its dripping awnings, the shop-fronts and open doorways laying their magic carpets across the sidewalks. The strung lanterns, the windchimes, the prayer flags are battered, but still bright.

Betty is sipping a tall drink in the porchway of the bookstore.  
Her umbrella is genuine mermaid hide. 

She is tapping a kitten heel along to the Bossa nova from the late-night bistro opposite, but sways over to the kerb to help William just as soon as his busted brakes announce his longing to the whole goddamn world. 

The baby talk is nauseating, but Merion seems to regress treacherously towards it, nuzzling into all that mohair. 

“And how are you holdin’ up, honey?” Betty grips William by the elbows and stares up into his face, not deterred at all by him closing his eyes. She smells of candy and gin and cherried nostalgia. 

William likes her. 

“If I was doing well, then I wouldn’t be howling at his door.” 

Betty uses a pearl-tipped finger to tap William’s chin.  
“Sure you would, honey,” she tells him gently. “That’s the deal.” 

Somehow, William gets Merion and Merion’s blanket up the fire escape and onto the landing.  
William knows he isn’t being fair. Or in any way the fearless fucking intellectual he’s supposed to be.  
Merion noses the unlocked door open. 

Hannibal is in the bed.  
Alone.  
Thank fucking Jesus, William swallows, wiping his face on his cuffs.

“William?” Hannibal stirs and sits up. He smells of soap. “And Merion.”  
He stretches out to her and his voice stretches out her name too, tiredness in limb and language.  
“Darling,” he says, low and delicate, to them both. 

William feels the structure of Hannibal’s body more clearly than he can see it. As it moves, it interferes with the air that William has allowed himself to breathe again.  
He goes over, slowly. Into unknown territory.

“Hi.”  
“Hi.” Hannibal squints, hair over his face and crested at the back. He untangles himself from a damp bath towel. “I think I fell asleep.”  
“I wasn’t sure. If this was alright.”  
William gets pulled down, in answer. Hannibal gets himself onto William’s lap.

They kiss, and it is starving. And slow.

“I am so sorry to have been so absent,” Hannibal murmurs, pushing William’s coat down off him. “My manager’s wife is in the hospital, so I have been performing some of his duties at the refuse centre.”

His eyes are so dark. And oh, lord; his skin is the cause of all desire.

“You work so hard,” William touches Hannibal. He cannot help it. His voice has no veneer to it now. It is all heartwood, all splintering need. “Tell me. I had a bad day. Tell me what you did at work. And every other second you weren’t with me.” 

And Hannibal talks about trash until William feels clean again. 

“The ugly little charities I help with,” Hannibal’s hand is in William’s hair. He strokes a curl between thumb and forefinger. “The runts, the unromantic organisations. They need volunteers more than they need resources.”  
“Now you tell me.” William keeps kissing Hannibal. He cannot help it. “I kind of donated to them. The ones you told me about. All of them.”

Hannibal laughs. Pleased. Exhausted.  
“Really?”  
“Yeah. I…felt like if I gave them money, they would let you finish early, maybe? Just one goddamn evening this week.” William smiles.  
He smiles and Hannibal laughs again.  
“William. It is not a hostage situation.”  
“I know. I know.” William stops smiling. “I missed you.”  
“I know. I know.” Hannibal echoes him. His voice is ebbing. He is heavy with fatigue. William feels that unnameable thing crowding him, lightness, heaviness. 

Unbalance and rightness.

“I really want you.” Whispers. Darkness. Mouths and skin and bandaged fingertips. “Fuck. God, I want you. I can’t think clearly. It all ends up just coming back around to you.” 

But they are both so tired.

And there is the rest of today, and tomorrow.

“William. Undress. Lie down beside me.”  
Hannibal lays his thigh across William’s thigh. His arm across William’s chest. His hand encloses William’s beribboned wrist. 

Desire holds its peace. It joins their hands together, chastely. For now.

And William closes his eyes. 

He is all Hannibal, Hannibal is all him.

He wants to sleep. He wants Hannibal to sleep.

Together, like this.

Because, it would seem, that is the deal.


	11. Chapter 11

_Notes for new cycle. Poem three. (maybe)_ ''letmeshipwreckinyourthighs''.goddamn wish id got to that line first.  


fuck you Dylan Thomas

  
  


The sheets are strange.  
The slanted shadows are skewed, unfamiliar.  
William rolls over.  
No Hannibal.  
No Merion, either.

William gets up. Walks in wonderland. 

Paintings. Plants. Photographs. 

The shower room has a little handle you can turn to slide back the skylight; sunrise foams above him. William scrubs himself with soap that froths with sea-salt and pale grey herbs; clouds cream across his skin. 

He borrows loungewear, kept spiced in a cedarwood cabinet. Plucks an apple from the windowsill, kept crisp by the dew. 

The attic space is vertebrae’d with vinyl records, shelved floor to ceiling. 

And the books. The books are ubiquitous enough to be, in fact, invisible, organic. His own included.  
They are, in some rooms, literally part of the furniture. 

Hannibal’s kitchen drawers are a shuddering chaos of knives and Heath Robinson gadgets.  
Hannibal’s sex toys are, conversely, kept _immaculately_ , like the tools of a surgeon, in a velvet-lined dresser.  
They remind William how much Hannibal could cut him to pieces, if he chose to.  
They remind William how much he wants them to fuck. 

As if the rub of Hannibal’s clothing against him, the tart lick of his fruit, deep in William’s belly, was not enough. 

As if. As if. 

He leans on the balcony railing, silent in the silence, waiting. 

“Honey, would you mind?” Betty elbows her way through the front door.  
She is cradling a heap of bakery bags close to her sweetheart neckline. After William helps her, she hugs him too, as if he was just as fragile. 

Hannibal and Merion have made it up the fire escape. Hannibal carries a leash over one shoulder. He wears a raggedy, sleeveless white t-shirt and worn sweats, cut off at the knee.  
William fails to _not stare_.  
“The chai,” Hannibal remembers, kisses William and goes back out of the door. 

Betty fusses with the pastries, all frills and butterscotch buttons.  
She grins, on William’s behalf, at the intensity of the kiss. 

“Uh.” William presses his fingernails into his palms and makes himself say it. “Betty. I mean, obviously, if you brought breakfast, it seems only fair…?”  
“Shoot,” she cusses, “I’d love to join you boys, but there’s me with a darn lecture at eight. I’d better put the honesty box out in the store and go get my notes in good order.” 

She coos her goodbyes at Merion. 

“And for God’s sake, call me Bedelia,” she adds, “Betty’s just a silly nickname Hannibal called me when we were married.” 

William blinks.  
“Uh…”  
He tries again. “Uh…have a good…lecture.”  
“Oh, I will.” She waves herself out with a bear claw. “Whether my students do so is another matter, given that today I’m teaching Internationalism and patronage in first to seventh century British art.” 

William hears Hannibal pass her on the staircase. 

Then, the door closes.  
Hannibal comes over.  
He smells of the park and of the morning itself. And their mouths are wet, and reiterating, their mouths are endlessly dawning days, unflavoured, as yet, with fulfilment. Over and again their mouths promise, erasing all yesterdays, all memories except the ones that will be new-made as theirs, from now on. 

William makes a sound that softly shakes him by the throat.  
Hannibal kisses where the sound came from; he kisses William’s mouth and jaw and then his breastbone and his ribcage, following the sound down. 

Merion is asleep on the bed. 

“Come upstairs?” Hannibal wonders, pressing his cheek against William’s hip. 

The attic is full of songs, but it is also couched with cushions, the floor is a mattress, the rugs are layered and river-coloured, blood-coloured, the colours of earth and leaves and the sun.

“You are the loveliest goddamn thing I have ever fucking seen.” William puts Hannibal down and smooths him out and kneels over him. “And I am hurting because of it.”  
He runs one hand up and down Hannibal’s old t-shirt. “I mean…it hurts _not_ to be with you.” William works the cotton up, and down, bunching it in his fist so he can see the damp skin at Hannibal’s collarbone, the hot skin above his waistband. “I don’t understand…” William stops and his fingers slide into one of the rips in the threadbare white cloth. He frowns. “Why is being _with_ you so painless? And being without you so _pointless_?”  
Hannibal curls his forearms over his face, and sighs, and allows William to stretch out the hole he has chosen, fingering open the tatters around Hannibal’s heart.  
William is greedy; intent and iris-dimmed, and his hand eases and spreads until the fabric parts for his knuckles. The edges fray a little, and William strokes Hannibal’s chest through the widened gap. He stretches out the shirt so the nipple is exposed. He lowers his head to taste. His mouth is watering so badly. He dips his head and mouths at the metal piercing through the flesh. He salivates and starts to bite, the metal ring clashing against his teeth. He can hear Hannibal’s breathing change, and William moves his mouth back to Hannibal’s mouth. 

Hannibal murmurs William’s name, between kisses, between their tongues, and William’s hands tear up the rest of the shirt. The noise as he pulls it apart makes both of them uncomfortably hard.

“I’ll buy you something new,” he swears on Hannibal’s smile. 

They shift so that they can actually take the rest of their clothes off. 

The window in the room is lintelled low, under one of the eaves.  
The Patchworks is a sunken city in the nacreous light. Gentle. Drifting towards the bluing surface of consciousness. 

They lie together at the bottom of the ocean. 

William’s body pearls, shining and swelling. Hannibal drinks up the drops. He is careful to duck his chin, lower his lashes, turn his head away, right up until when William moves between his legs. 

William knows that he fucking needs to see Hannibal’s eyes.  
Needs to see them as he sucks and as he stops sucking.  
Needs to see what makes them fly wide. What makes them _his_. 

“Please. Look at me. I’m sorry,” William brushes Hannibal’s hair back from where it falls forward. “I don’t want you to hide because of me. I’m sorry I’ve been so…inconsistent.”  
“You are finding your balance,” Hannibal says seriously, gazing at William and drawing his fingers between them, underneath. 

To where he is slackened. Slick. And stoppered up with silver. 

“If it is a consolation, you have _me_ awry and adrift. I am tired, and yet cannot rest. I am hungry, and yet cannot eat.” Hannibal encourages William to soothe the place where he has sealed himself so very wide open.  
“I did this before I walked Merion, while you slept,” Hannibal says slowly, unevenly. As William stares down and swallows. “And I thought of you the whole time. And with every step, I thought of how ready I am for you, to love you, should you want me, this way. As I want you.” 

“Should _I_ want _you?_ ” William doubts that such a doubt exists.  
“Should you want to take me. Here. Right here.” Hannibal explains, his hand placed over William’s hand, over where he wants William. “Should you want to fuck me, and fuck me, and fuck me…” 

William bites Hannibal’s neck, his ear, his throat, his lips. Hannibal strokes him, almost too dry, almost too desperate. William pants and lifts Hannibal’s legs up.

He takes the oil Hannibal gives him and works the hard thumb of metal from Hannibal’s body and makes himself acceptable and slides his cock all the way up inside. 

They just look at each other.  
And look.  
And look.

“Should I fucking _want_ you?” William’s voice breaks with disbelief. “Jesus Christ. Of course I fucking _want_ you.” 

Hannibal is fresh and naked and sweating. 

“Jesus. Hannibal.”  
“William. Tell me.”

“I fucking want you. I fucking adore you.” He pulls out and pushes in and fucks Hannibal and they just look at each other. 

There are no further words, because the necessary words have been said. William is, for one moment, afraid that _all_ the necessary words have been said, that there are no more words for him, now, if he has this, but then Hannibal ripples under him and William can only think of one word anyway.

And how gorgeous he is as he pants.  
And how gorgeous he is as he trembles.

And how gorgeous he is as they come.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Really sorry for the delay in updating, my dog got worse. Next chapter also written though, so just typing up.xxxxxxx

_Draft /poem three/for him._

_Bright, warm belly,_  
_From which I am birthed, clasped, sheeted,_  
_Wide, in half a dream, adrift, still tremulous,_  
_tyrannous flutter for the absent contour;_  
_for this newer monster._  
_Knee-wide, now, easily fed, yet not defeated._  
_I ask questions of the clock that were,_  
_yesterday,_  
_unimportant._

 

Margot is satiny, ironclad. 

Even though it is no use, no use at all, because William thinks that the mortal wound was made long ago, under the steel, beneath the silk. She smiles a smile that is soldered on; but a welcome it must be. 

To her brother’s party. Her brother’s house. 

Where most of the guests fucking hate one another.  
Or are simply fucking one another.  
Or both. 

Mason is a fan of _theatre_. 

There are writers. There are critics.  
Matthew clutches onto Chilton’s arm; a preening hawk. On one hand he trails the jess of a new engagement ring. 

William rabbits a little and hustles his date for the evening along the showy blood-spill of a carpet. He wants to just leave, knows that he should at least thank the hostess before leaving, wonders just what the holy fuck Hannibal has done to him, that he is even considering the second thing before the first. 

“Why, you are _such_ a delicious cocktail, Ms Verger. All ice and sparkle,” Bedelia beams, having chauffeured William in her Chevrolet Bel Air, and then having taken pity on him, being stood up and all.  
William sighed but gave in. Only he would have a bodyguard in buttercup angora.  
She winks at Margot. “I bet your sweetheart here just wants to drink you right on up.”

Alana coughs slightly. 

“Apparently not,” Margot says. “Apparently, I’m more like the Tin Man tonight, Dr Du Maurier. Lacking heart.” She shakes Alana off and there is the rattle of sequinned armour. “Perhaps you would care to taste my Tom Collins? I’ve been told that it’s to die for.”

Alana watches them go, lips a line. It takes her a while to turn back to William.  
“So,” she grabs at a passing scotch. “Is this your life now, Will? A different piece of ass for every occasion?”

William takes something from a platter. Prettied-up butchery, stabbed through with little swords that are too sharp to be kitsch. 

“Turns out our contract doesn’t cover courtesy. Or friendship. So, fuck you.”  
He waves towards the bar, where Margot is melting quite nicely over Betty. “Anyway, shouldn’t you be keeping an eye on your own…investments?” 

“And shouldn’t you be thanking me, you self-righteous shit? Matthew could have sold himself to Freddie Lounds. This way we control the exposure he gets. Or doesn’t get. We can use his creepy, crayony scribblings to springboard your book into the bestsellers.”

William chews it over. He is hungry. He missed lunch because he fell asleep. He fell asleep because he was fucking Hannibal, slowly, sweetly, deeply, while they were both drenched in the moon-honeyed dawn. 

He might even have said something irretrievable. In between all the sweating and swearing.  
Something scarier than the whole smoked conger eel which snarls up from the buffet table, split at the spine for the ink-winged crows to pick at.

Other than that, he has no god-damn idea why Hannibal isn’t there with him. In fact, the hell with Hannibal; he isn’t concerned. At. All.

As if. As if.

“Just stop slumming your way through the Patchworks and get the fucking poems done, Will.” Alana is still talking business. She no longer twists her hair untidily out of the way as she does so.  
Now, it is a dark and glossy familiar on her shoulder, and she pats it and pets it like it will bite her if she doesn’t. “And make sure they’re better than the bastard verse of Byron and Blanchfield, ok?”  
William pushes his glasses back up into place. “Or what? What if I don’t?” 

_Can’t?_

“You know, I think of us and I can imagine what being eaten alive by the Verger lawyers is like. An entirely emotionless affair,” he muses, holding Alana’s stare. Takes a second morsel and slides it in, after the first. “Passionless, even.”

Alana waits until William has swallowed.

“You think I used you, Will? You think Matthew hurt you? Badly? You have no fucking idea. Mason is…different.” She picks up one of the appetisers. “This is Margot’s Andalusian.”  
“What?”  
“Her favourite dressage horse. Margot tried to move in with me. Last week. So Mason told her that Caspar fell ill, while she was in my bed.” She twirls the meat around. “This is honouring him.” 

William realises that he has never seen Alana wear red before.  
But then, there is weaponry glittering upon the walls. Dead things flanking the dead hearthplaces. 

Something that won’t show the stains might be a good choice in this household, after all. 

William puts his food down. Without really thinking about it, he touches the grey ribbon around his wrist.  
And right then, Hannibal appears. 

Smoke and slink. A jinn with eyes of cinnamon fire.

“I am so sorry to be late, William,” he is radiant from rushing. His hair is a little damp and smells of the leafy potion he buys from the market. William tries for indignation, he tries for bitter herbs, and tastes nought but sweetfern shampoo; he tastes Hannibal with his lips and lungs, and he is so fucking fresh, in the stale, social torture chamber they are standing in, that William wants to bathe in him, wants to wash himself down with desire.  
“Forgive me?” This time Hannibal whispers, cupping William’s jaw and brushing his lips against William’s ear. “Please?” 

William cannot answer.

“And how are you, Alana?” Hannibal nods politely and steps forward to kiss her cheek. The fabric of his formal sarong shifts. Parts to the thigh. Closes. Will stops listening to the conversation. “Did you get the house? It is a nice part of the city. The people there throw very little trash out, and recycle responsibly.”

Alana laughs, suddenly, in release. “Well, the offer’s in. Just waiting.” And she straightens her scarlet self and lifts her chin. “If you will excuse me, _Hannibal_ , I’d better go and make sure my meal ticket’s still valid. Otherwise, how’s a girl to live?” 

Hannibal looks at William.  
William shrugs. 

“So,” he scrapes at his scruff. "Didn't we come here to see that Algardi statue?" The bite marks under his collar begin to ache again. For attention. 

"I fear that it will be on display somewhere...private. Away from the crowd." 

And William links his hand to Hannibal's hand and bites his bottom lip. “So...shall we go see if we can find it?”


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> follows on from last chapter, at the party.

_Poem?/draft/notes_

_Mortification/But not regret//We should never conceal love/nor give its name to other, darker bonds//For (i am discovering that) either pretence will not end/well._

 

Margot waves them through some double doors, and they mount a thousand steps up into the Verger’s private underworld. They weave left, left, and left again, the entire house bent sinister around them. 

Or so it seems; William’s compass spins towards Hannibal alone. 

He wishes he’d brought a ball of yarn along. At every corner he can hear pawing hooves, can feel the prick of horns between his shoulders; Mason as Minotaur. 

Makes a change from Mephistopheles.

They reach the end of a long landing of masterworks. The scrap of shattered terracotta is pinned together in a dim niche. 

“Better than Bernini.” Hannibal stands there, strangely shy, before the sacred clay, and he is just heart-poundingly _everything_ to William.  
For William is not the one seeking treasure. For him, it is already there; his garbage guy, draped in Tyrian purple. 

“Uh. I wondered…where you were?”  
“I was with Jack. He required my help. I did not mean to worry you.”  
“Uh. Yeah. I…kind of thought maybe I’d said the wrong thing. This morning.” William studies Hannibal’s face, as Hannibal in turn studies the broken head of some dusty baroque Pope. Then he frowns. “I mean, fuck, lately, I can’t even get close to the right phrasing, the right rhythm…”  
“Your rhythm is just fine. Say it again,” Hannibal interrupts, quietly. Turning, so that his expression glides off the sculpture and right onto William. 

It intensifies. 

It isn’t even happiness.

“Uh...what?” William is backed up, into an alcove, off to the side.  
He drops down to sit on the ottoman there. Hannibal stands directly in front of him. The material of his top-shirt is smooth under William’s fingertips, and sheer enough so that the heat of him throbs through. William is helpless, hungry. 

He lingers on bicep and belly. Hard curves and soft. 

“What do you want?” William murmurs, again, as if he doesn’t know. 

As if. As if. 

“Anything, Hannibal.” He feels fists twist gently, in his hair. “I’ll give you anything you want.”

The colours of Hannibal are the colours of the corridor; both are curtained in velvet-wine, both are patterned with shadow-black.  
And both are ornamented with curlicues of bronzing gold.

The difference is that Hannibal does not wear a veneer of opulence, covering up the rot. His richness does not diminish as William pulls aside the folds of fabric; it grows, waxing under William’s touch. His is not a splendour of the surface. It is a limitless warmth, and glory. 

William does not think that Hannibal’s radiance has an end. 

He slides his hands upward, underneath the sarong, kneading the muscles at the front of the thigh.  
They both groan.  
William scrapes behind Hannibal’s knees with his nails. For once, he has heeded. He has heard. He has learned. 

Hannibal draws a prayer in, dirty and delighted.

“I would like you to say it again,” he moves against William, swaying, scented with orchids and nicotine. “Please, say it. As you do _this_ to me.”  
Hannibal takes William’s wrist, the beribboned wrist, and he positions William’s palm so that he can grind his dampening cock against it.  


“I…meant it.” William says slowly, breaching Hannibal’s propriety, rucking up his clothes, putting his hands up Hannibal’s goddamn skirts, for fuck’s sake. Pulling his underwear down low so that he can rub spittle into the end of him.

William cannot stop staring at the filthy picture it makes. 

But he has to know. He can deal with something one-sided; he has dealt with imbalance all of his life, one way or another; too few emotions, then too many. Too many words, then, when it has mattered, too few.

But with this, he has to know.

So, he tilts his head and meets Hannibal’s eye. There is almost no lamplight around the ancient, hostaged artefacts, but Hannibal is aglow, all the same. For him.  
Darkgold-glazed, urging. Fluttering open, fluttering shut.

“Jesus,” William swallows. “I do. I fucking love you.”

And they kiss, and Hannibal works himself against William’s grip, until his panting is enough to drive the gods themselves insane.  
Then Hannibal pauses, and takes off his briefs, but nothing else. He tucks them, deliberately, into the pocket of William’s jacket. 

William undoes his pants and frees himself. He is hard. Hannibal licks at him until he is harder.

Hannibal gets up onto his lap. A shoe falls onto the rug. They ease together, Hannibal wet, and ready.  
“Christ.” William leans back to look. “Hannibal. It shouldn’t be this good.”

They cannot hear the grotesquery of the party. It is all so far away. And they have only senses enough for themselves.

“Yes. I know. William, I love you.”  
“Yeah?” William lifts up Hannibal’s shirt. “Thank fuck for that.” He presses on Hannibal’s nipples, dragging on the rings. He bought Hannibal the twin torques of caramel-colour metal to wear, bronzing gold against his skin, and the symbolism of it has not escaped him.  
“Like that?”  
“Yes. God, yes, William. But, no. Take my hips. Let me move now.” 

There might be security personnel. Guard dogs. Cameras. Or maybe Mason employs arrogance alone to keep his house in order.  
Whatever. It isn’t like they’re going to stop. 

For _anything._

__

Hannibal rises and falls. Teasing.  
“Love fucking your hole.”  
“Yes, William. You. Inside me.”  
“And your mouth.”

Hannibal bites William’s thumb.  
“Yes. And my mouth. Later. Please. This now. My love.”  
“Jesus. You saying… _that_. While I’m right _there…._ "  
William tucks Hannibal’s long fringe away from his face. To see him. “I’m gonna go really deep in you now. Ok? Can I fuck you hard?”  
“Yes. I want you.”  
William bucks up. Grunts. Hannibal takes him, pressing down. They use the leverage of the floor and the wall behind the ottoman and the ottoman itself.  
To make it like they don’t exist as individuals.  
To erase that distinction between them.  
To make William as much inside Hannibal as is possible.  
They cannot meet with their mouths, because all of the kissing is being done with their bodies.

And Hannibal makes a yearning sound and William understands; he understands Hannibal, his true words, and honest needs, and he thrusts, deep, and hard, just like he said he would, because the words between them matter, and he does it over and over, again and again, until they come. 

He wants to tell Hannibal that he loves him, but has to settle for just thinking it, because his voice, and his control, and his capacity for anything, except holding Hannibal as tightly as he can, is gone.

And all of it takes time to return. They are neither of them young men. 

Silently, eventually, they find a bathroom. They do the best they can with the fancy soaps and the fancy towels. 

Hannibal is sleepy. Fucking strong and fucking sleepy and fucking cute. 

William grins at him in the mirror, then stops. Remembers.  
“Shit. Jack. Your boss. Uh, his wife’s in the hospital? How’s it all…going? Cancer, you said?”  
“She is no longer there.”

William kneels and puts Hannibal’s slipper back on his foot. God-damn Prince Charming.

Helps to retie the straps of the sarong, to make Hannibal seemly. His groin smells of their sex. William touches it with his cheek. The material is so fine. Has kind of a bloom to it. Like a plum. A damson. The smell and the colour are both ripe, lovely.  


William waits for the flood of metaphor to begin, but it doesn’t. He’s tired. Literally fucked-out; it remains simply damson cloth.  


Does it matter?  
Hannibal looks good in it. It has William’s scent on it.  


Sure, he reasons, it matters; that there is no monster, no poetry. But _how_ much does it matter?  


William puts a kiss to Hannibal’s hipbone. For some reason, the thought of Hannibal consoling a virile, grieving widower matters a hell of a lot more, right at that moment. 

He decides that he is, undoubtedly, a jealous prick. 

He creaks his way to standing, putting back the fancy lotion in its fancy holder.  
“She…I mean, she got better?”  
“Unfortunately, no. There was nothing more to be done. So they sent her home to die.”  
“Shit. Fuck.” William blinks. “I’m sorry…”

Something in Hannibal, something he hasn’t seen before, makes him take Hannibal by the waist. Bring him in close.

“Christ. Wait. You were so late…Jesus, Hannibal. You came here…after something happened? Did something happen? Don’t tell me, I mean, did Jack’s wife…die?”

And Hannibal leans against him. Like he can’t wait for them to go home and fall into bed. With Merion on her blanket by the balcony doors. 

“No, William.” Hannibal runs a hand through William’s curls. “Bella Crawford didn’t die this evening," he says. "Because I killed her.”


	14. Chapter 14

_poem / draft.  
where are/you i/am sorry i/did not want/you i/miss you_

Hannibal’s sugarcake has too much sugar. 

William ditches it into the rye.

Gulls tear it apart.

Toy boats butterfly, out on the shimmer, and William feels sick just to look at them.

“We were talking it over,” William tells Dr Katz. “Later on, like any couple would.” She watches his eyes reflect a daisy-chain of clouds. “Hannibal, telling me how it was to assist in a suicide. To push the needle underneath the skin. He was so…uncorrupted by it.” 

He pauses. Licks his lips. “And the words started. And they were right there, inside me. Just like old times.”

His fingertips sparkle; remembrance of a delicacy he does not deserve. He scrubs them on his serge and then scrams sourly at his beard until his jaw prickles and cries out a little blood. 

“So. I kept on. Asking questions. Bruising him. To feed the flow. Making him say…things. About how it felt to kill, about how she must have felt, to be killed.”

Dr Katz scuffs her bare heels into the sandy soil. 

“Well.” Her wrists jangle; a hollow sound. “Articulation of trauma can be beneficial. If he was minded to share…”

“I really didn’t give a fuck about his mind, Doctor. Maybe I never have?” William makes himself shrug. “He was simply the key to the cellar door, and I’ve been too long without what lives down there.” 

William smiles, but knows that it isn’t really a smile. 

“Jesus Christ, he kept thanking me for listening.”

“Will…”

“I am so much better at living when I'm with him...”

“It’s…”

“…but I could not wait to get out of his goddamn arms and his goddamn bed and just go and _write_. And write. Let it have me. The poem. Let it fucking come all over me.”

A couple hold hands, close by, and jump, together. 

“I like what he does with watermelon.” Dr Katz picks black pepper from her teeth. “Is this a Lithuanian spice?”

“Lithuanian?” William twists, confined by candy stripes; their row of deckchairs billows towards the lake, which is waisted by a trim little bridge. Hannibal and Merion dally, distant, back down the duck-ringed arc of it. 

“And he gets hit on, like, a lot.” Dr Katz is frowning too. Small voiced. And she does not face William, now. Not at all. “He’s so sweet about it though. And to all the kids trying to pet your dog. Does he want kids of his own, someday, Will?” 

William hunches his shoulders again, at a loss in his own life. His hairline is sticky. One of Hannibal’s button-downs lies, borrowed, beneath his jacket.

He has misjudged the weight of _everything_. 

White knives of light shine down and should flay him; should gut him clean. 

Only, light cannot make dark things light. It can only show them even more clearly for what they are. 

Ugly. And unwholesome.

“Being with me, if I start writing, really writing again, it’ll ruin him. I will ruin him. And then, I will probably write about that, too.” 

If Dr Katz screws up her eyes it is only because each chopping crest has been stitched with sequins by the sun.

What other reason could there be? 

“He might be strong enough…”

“I can’t have both, can I?” William asks, quietly. “How much has Mason been paying you to push me? I’ll double it if you can honestly tell me that I can have Hannibal _and_ the work.” 

He swats at a spiralling insect. 

It breaks and wets the inside of his fist and there it is; it is _there _, that long, secret tongue of his, that flicks around the syllables and makes them slot together, slippery and solid.__

____

His poetry, piggybacking on panic, on pain.

____

Because, of course it does.

____

Of course.

____

He hates more than _anything_ that Matthew _knew_ this. Could deal with it, was more than a match for William at his most distorting.

____

“I don’t even _need_ it back.” William takes out a serviette and cleans himself up. “I could write a play. Another novel. But I want it. I want it back. Fuck happiness, right? Anyone can have that.”

____

Only poetry is immortal. 

____

Hannibal is close enough to wave to; William blinks down at the dirt and dead ants instead. 

____

Two guys waltz by, applauded by other Patchworks picnickers. 

____

Margot claps too. She sits on a bench further along the slope, awaiting her own al fresco therapy with friend Beverly. 

____

Bright waves of laughter break from her, and the edging sparrows spring back, only to peck forward again a moment later; Bedelia has the other half of Hannibal’s lunch hostage, and there are crumbs and berry stains on both of their dresses. 

____

“It’s fucking ridiculous.”

____

“No, Will. It’s art.”

____

Hannibal stops off by the girls and Merion is adored and Hannibal is adorable. There’s some sort of charitable event they’re all planning, something decent and inventive and even Alana has been persuaded to help out. Apparently. 

____

Hannibal looks over at William; the entire park flushes and averts its gaze.

____

William stands up. He picks up Hannibal’s basket. He holds it too tightly. 

____

The psychiatrist reaches out and touches William on the arm. “Each step forward has to pierce you. Wound you. Otherwise there is no balance to the bargain.”

____

"Who is that?" William suddenly wants to laugh. "Eliot? Plath?”

____

“No, Will.” Dr Katz slides her sunglasses back down her nose and blinds herself. He gets the idea. She has spent weeks sharpening the cutter but does not wish to see the executioner go about his trade. “It’s from ’The Little Mermaid’.”

____

William walks away from the water. 

____

Hannibal takes his hand. He kisses William’s downturned mouth until it opens, and then he lets himself be led into the blue-green shadowing of the trees.

____


	15. Chapter 15

_poem ?? /Notes/draft/whatever._

_it only bleeds if it stays in_  
_too deep for knifing._  
_Instead; articulate, dislocate art_  
_from the gold that the crows clap for,_  
_knowing not that what they sip_  
_and draw straws for,_  
_is spat, and not spun._  
_Breached,_  
_The cu_

_Godgodgod. Him. the way he moved on me-splitting him spilling me…god god god. I lost the fucking ribbon. lost him. stupid sttuppid Stupid. NOT ABOUT HIM >not everything has to be about _him_. fuck. _

 

The community college is crowded. 

William gets lost in the crafted chaos of the converted textile factory; a mill of the mind now, its interlocking corridors and classrooms unweave him.

Hooks and eyes fasten memory; soap-scent, a tattoo, the way someone walks around a corner. 

Pieces pulling together, to tear him apart. 

He winds up, an angry, scruffy bobbin, in the clicking, clacking cafeteria. Trying to pick his way out, he is instead funnelled into the line of plodding patrons.

“Press here.” The guy waiting alongside him leans across and taps his knife against the dispensing machine.

William takes an earthenware beaker. 

Presses. 

_There_. 

He feels the guy smile at the sudden gush. 

William is processed. A wooden tray slots itself between his hands. He takes biscotti, petalled with almonds, and slips the silvery change onto a prominent, charitable salver on the counter-top. It is open, and shining, and lovely, and he is dizzy for want of that; for that physical invitation to be generous. Something he had, but did not want, five days ago.

Less than a week since he rededicated himself to immortality, and _everything_ hurts.

For fuck’s sake. The price of it will pass, William bites at himself, and squints towards the brightness of a balcony. 

“May I?” The guy from the queue has followed William out and now sits down nearby, on the kind of stool that spreads his legs. 

“Visiting lecturer, are we?” Behind him is a bare-brick wall. Time and experience have flayed it down to a deceiving velvet. 

His glance is the same. 

“You needn’t look so concerned, _Professor_ ,” he stripteases with a spangled scarf. “I’m sure your audience will simply _lap_ you up.”

The cream drips; William’s fingers tremble, a little, at any task but the holding of a pen. He has written himself raw, and willingly; for it is adored, this thing, which claws to get out. Which allows nothing else in, which will not share him, unless, perhaps, in some mindless, meaningless sort of a way. 

“Let me guess? You specialise in something…erotic? Poetry? You look tired enough to be practising what you preach.”

William pauses in dismantling his food. There is nobody for him to feed the despised slivers to, nobody to refuse to kiss until all are eaten, at which point he will prove, slowly, that he doesn’t really mind the toasted taste after all.

He clears his throat of crumbs. “I’m looking for Dr Bedelia Du Maurier.” 

“Ah. Well. I’m afraid you’ve wandered quite some distance from the main lecture hall.”

“That where she is?”

“I’m not sure I could say, with certainty." The guy cuts into the belly of a pear and moves his tongue, clockwise, around the rim of the wound. "In any event, her arty little slide-shows tend to drag on _interminably_. Perhaps I could offer to amuse you until she finishes off all those eager young scholars?” 

He sucks now, mouth wide, making sure that William is watching. 

Somebody drops spoons, over by the cash register. 

“I have accommodation on campus,” the guy adds, quietly. “Would you like to see?” 

William rasps the pad of his finger across a series of dry, vanilla crusts. He is hungry. Heartsore. 

He could very easily fuck someone, right now. 

He has tried to fuck himself, but it’s been mechanical, to say the least. 

He wonders how quickly he could get the guy to come, and whether he’s the type to suffer having his pretty face pushed into the pillow, so that William wouldn’t feel so goddamn sick at the reality of who it _wasn’t_ , bent beneath him, and moaning for more.

Whether he would have to talk when it was over. 

The coffee coils, black in the brown cup. 

He bought some rope a week ago. In a hardware place over on Connorsway that he actually located on a map and drove out to. In his lap, later, he saw that it wasn’t right. 

If the words hadn’t tempted him away, he was going to find a more specialised supplier. 

There must be stores. For stuff like that. 

Hannibal would have known where to go, but William had wanted to do it himself, for them. 

Strong silks that could take a knot, but in honour. He had wanted to bring tight little buds to the spreading branches of Hannibal, not blisters. Not anything that could blight, or burn. 

If the words hadn’t snagged him, away from the growing, the pure. 

If the words weren’t winning, with their barbs and bitter fruit.

William shifts in his chair, unbalanced. His cock fills while the rest of him hollows out. “Are you interested in education, Mister...?” 

“Dimmond.” A voice informs him, sweetly, from the doorway. “Funny. I thought _everyone_ knew dear old Anthony.” Dr Du Maurier tilts her daisied, braided halo to one side, but her tone is not one of admiration. “And here you are, Mr Graham. Auditioning for your next muse?” 

“Betty.” William drags along in her wake, hitting hazards. 

In the stairwell they stop. She has cherries on her cheeks. He wishes she would slap him, maybe.

“What do you want?”

William obviously cannot tell her. That he wants Hannibal not to be too good for him. 

“Back there…that man.” He frowns with his shoulders. “I don’t want _that_ , if you’re running off to tell tales…”

“I wouldn’t add to Hannibal's misery, honey. He's already painfully aware that he was no more than a temporary distraction. From the rigours of being the next Great American Poet.”

William razors his palms against the iron railing. “Is he..?”

“What do you want?”

“I want him to answer his fucking door.” People stare, now. “It’s locked, for Chrissakes. It’s _never_ locked. Is it because he…because he’s…”

“Is that any of your concern?”

“And none of his neighbours will speak to me. And Margot called me a prick, and Alana just asks if the break-up is helping any with the work.” 

Dr Du Maurier taps a golden heel on the bottom step. 

William flicks his eyes out over the quad. Trees billow. Students stroll. A guitar stitches together Joni Mitchell numbers, because of course it does. “I…I left…Merion’s leash in his apartment. Her favourite one. Red. With brown trim. I need it back.”

“Sure, sugar,” she laughs, unkindly, and it lingers a long while. “Sure you do.” For someone without practice in malice, she’s a fucking pro. “Follow me.” 

There’s a picture of them on the wall of her office. Hannibal and Bedelia Lecter. Suited in cheap satin and wearing buttonholes like the crumpled paper roses that William has been tossing onto his study floor for the last hundred hours or so.

“You lived together. In Florence.” William stares at Hannibal, at his confidence and his confetti, then makes himself stop. Then he cannot stop and lets himself stare again. “They say the Old World is kind to young love.”

Betty is digging through a hundred or so drawers and pigeon-holes. 

“It was the Fell Scholarship, Mr Graham. Married couples only need apply. I was ambitious, but a spinster. Hannibal was a friend, and obliging.”

“I…never…”

“He played at husband for exactly one academic year.” She slams a cupboard shut. Winks, maliciously. “Got pretty darn good at it, too.”

The school bell shrills. Betty straightens the serrated pleats of her cute lemon skirt. 

“Though he never once looked at me the way he _always_ looked at you, you self-righteous, self-absorbed dumbass.”

There is something very sharp about the contempt of a kindly person. But she throws him the spare key anyways. 

“What if he’s there..?”

“Oh, he won’t be, Mr Graham. I’m not even sure he’ll ever go back. To where he was happy.”

“Go back?” William lifts his head.

“Some bastards beat him up in the park, early yesterday morning.” Betty is all mimosa and reproach. “Hannibal’s been in the hospital ever since.”


	16. Chapter 16

_poem ? (tell Alana this one goes at the end.)_

_Yours is the only dirt I pearl for._  
_I only pretend for you._  
_I don’t fight myself for anyone else,_  
_Or dust my knuckles down._  
_And if you stop unearthing me,_  
_My own, unearthly you,_  
_Show me the hands that would be left,_  
_To dig us from the ground._

 

William outpaces himself, through the lymphatic gutters, the park, the heart-choking channels of the city.

Bypassing. Cutting. He jaywalks and tyres ruck black upon the asphalt, horns out.

He cannot do anything but this. His inner eye has rolled back, his meaner needs sheathed in cold cartilage, so that he can pretend that Hannibal is not merely prey for poetry. 

Let him but get from the college to the hospital, now, now, now. He would have this; one last victory over viciousness, then he will cede adoration forever, with a grace he does not have. 

He skids along corridors. His teeth show. 

They won’t let him in.

Of fucking _course_ they won’t.

Why the fuck would they? 

The atrium beats a clot of memory out of William; he brought Matthew there once, that time he got stuck with thorns. 

Imbedded, infected. 

William had wanted very much, so very, very much, for Matthew to die. 

And when he did not, William asked for directions to the psych ward, over in Building Ten, and had himself committed.

He faces away. 

The Patchworks pulse by. A corner room. Canna lilies and covered dishes. Candy. 

It is all for Hannibal, this sweetwater, this eddying of earnest emotions, and William knows he is sluice-gated and bobbing, aborted, unalive, within this current, this amiable swell. 

An obstruction that all the good folk sidestep; necks and elbows hinged. 

“Don’t you like it when I fuck you with your own pen? Don’t you like it when the ink runs down your leg?”

The monster grins up at him from a gurney. 

William rubs his knuckle into his eye, under the glass, and knocks somebody’s coffee over.

The spend of it makes wing-shapes as it licks between the bleached floor tiles. 

He is gifted quills, of course.

Late swifts and painful swallows. 

He is gifted that time when Matt found out that William liked watching the little birds outside his study, more than, sometimes, just sometimes, more than sometimes, he liked fucking Matthew. 

Matt screamed. For hours. About ingratitude. About those little birds. 

And their neighbour, who is now dead, dead, dead, the one who hated them when she saw them kiss, hated them when they fought, hated when they fucked with the curtains wide, complained to the cops and then poured poison all along their garden fence.

Killed every apple tree they had. 

But, Merion didn’t get hurt. 

Matthew fed his worms elsewhere. 

And the little birds did not abandon William for long, to be pricked alone, by monsters. 

“Shut the goddamn fuck up.” William puts his hand down in the muddy mess and smears his reflection out of shape. 

Better that they had. Because Matthew always found a way to deal with _the competition_. 

“I hate the sound of you.” More hinges creak in William’s direction, primly, curiously. The hospital is uncompromisingly alert; a big, white trap. “I hate the sound of me. Every goddamn syllable. So shut the fuck up now.”

Matthew got badly scratched, reaching all the way into the briars, through the feathering panic, into the little nests. 

But his eyes were so bright, and his voice was so certain, and William hadn’t slept for a hundred years, and William was staggering, fucked bloody and bit, existing on praise and pain and whiskey, and in the end it was easier to obey Matt than to love him anymore. 

I can help you baby, I can make it _sing_. 

William curses and his knees soak in the curdle.

A pair of nice shoes, polished well, click closer towards him. And then stop.

“Clean yourself.” The paper towels clown absurdly towards him. William snatches at them in slow motion, looking up at Hannibal’s boss. “Get off the floor. Clean it off.” 

William wipes his hands and his trousers and then his forehead and his nose. 

“He’s gone outside for some air. You sonofabitch.” The man is named Jack Crawford, William thinks. Hannibal killed his wife, William remembers. “Go do something about it.”

William nods; unhinged. 

“What. Happened? To him?” 

“You told him to go fuck himself,” the man shrugs. “Guess he was looking for someone to help him with that. In the park. Some ungodly hour.” 

William takes longer than is necessary to find the small, cement garden. But he does find it.

It’s hot outside, under the vents, under the hot flat sky.

Hannibal is wearing a thin hospital gown. William’s words blue right through it, blurred by bruises. 

Hannibal is alone; side-on he is so slight, standing there, staring at his bandaged hands. The high walls force their colours onto him. William wonders if there was always so much grey. 

“Jesus,” he mumbles. “God, no. Fuck.”

Then, even as he grinds forward onto the gravel, he sees. 

A honed thing, unhidden only now, because being bested clearly does not agree with Hannibal. He is stripped-back, unmade-up, he is restless, and William has never seen him _scowl_ like that before.

Not ash, but iron. Slenderness, for sure; but all the better to slit, sharply, between the bones. 

The danger of Hannibal dawns darkly upon William, as he squints against the light; since the beginning, has he not seduced and stalked, lied and threatened, spat upon convention, ended someone’s life? 

Layers lift. 

The cotton flutters, and Hannibal’s leg, bared, is enough to make William’s desire tumble up, up, over his relief. 

He wants to put his lips, again, again, to that familiar, strange, knifed old half-moon on Hannibal’s languorous lateral muscle. William has never asked Hannibal to history his quarter-dozen scars, he has just assumed that something so lovely must have been punished for it at some point. 

He decides, now, though, that he may have been wrong. He decides, now, that the silvering stars and stripes may be medals of some kind, the lesser wounds of a war that Hannibal is very used to winning.

And William gets very hard, very quickly, in his sweat-wet underthings, watching Hannibal move his damaged hands; Hannibal is, in fact, rolling his long, lean hands slowly into fists, over and over, methodically, in the manner of a mending. And there is nothing at all theoretical about the movement. It is all about honest preparation.

Trash scuds. 

Each siren is an annunciation. 

And the entire stupid fucking world ends, when Hannibal turns towards the doorway. 

Eyes golden, in the angled, concrete sunlight, spitting smoke from where he cannot put his cut lips together, Hannibal stamps on his cigarette and smiles, crookedly. 

“You came.”

“Yeah, well,” William sighs back. “I don’t like it. The other way. The being apart thing.” 

Maybe he should run, be done with monsters, but he is learning that each one is different, and this one? This one…William wants to keep. 

He goes over and holds Hannibal by one hip, two fingers at most resting over the blade of it. Hannibal nudges forward, neck curled. He cuts William open with his chest and cock and thigh and forearms. He even twists one foot up so that it slices, cold, between the scuff of William’s brogue and the fray of his trouser hem.

Inside.

Inside.

William surrenders, and Hannibal guts him. 

“Fucking God, baby. I missed you.” William finds Hannibal’s mouth. Rough, responding. Angry. Aroused. 

They kiss. All edges. All slippery, gaping holes and edges.

William pulls the material aside. Thumbs skin and coarse hair. Wants to take the sackcloth of it onto his tongue, but doesn’t yet deserve it. “No-one else is to be near you, like this. In any way. Only me. Understand?”

He is too hungry to be merciful. He wants his ribbon back. 

Hannibal reddens William’s chin and jaw by way of answer, then licks the blood off again when they have to stop. Hannibal is white. His breathing has grown complicated. 

William wants to fuck an apology into him, right there and then, regardless of their endless, internal haemorrhaging. 

“You are no longer afraid for me?” Hannibal straightens William’s glasses. 

William pushes Hannibal’s hair out of his eyes. It may be that finally, they are able to see one another. Hearts, nesting in thorns. 

And there are things that William has not given Hannibal.

And there are things that Hannibal has not yet given to William.

“They should be afraid. The ones who hurt you.” 

“I recognised them,” Hannibal replies. “From the Verger party. Hired brutes.”

“Mason’s men?”

“I was out running. I have not been able to settle. I was...upset, else they would not have found me so easy to subdue…”

William bows his head. Later, for that. “Mason had you…attacked?”

“I think he would like you to hurry up with your poems.”

“I’ll kill him.” If his monster was still a-fucking-round, not slithered off somewhere, scared of the real thing, William thinks it would recognise its own voice, in his voice. 

Really, it should be proud. 

“Thank you. But I would rather you complete your work. Not out of fear. Or because you are driven to do so. But just so that I may read it.” Hannibal puts one arm, painfully, around William’s waist. “In bed, naked, with you kneeling there, nervous, open-mouthed, and eager for my appreciation. Maybe I will even like you more, if your metre and thrust show...promise.” 

It is a domestic, everyday embrace. A nurse comes into the garden and is deliberate in his disdain for them, holding one another that way. 

William wants to kill him too.

Hannibal pulls on a handful of curls, amused. “Poets should not constantly concern themselves with murder, William,” he murmurs, and he stretches, delicately, the way William has always liked, although now they both know that he is tempering himself, testing his wounds for the battles to come. “You can leave all of that business to me.”


End file.
